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A PERSONAL RECORD 



BY 



JOSEPH CONRAD 




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HARPER fir BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 
M C M X I I 



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TR iocs 



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COPYRIGHT. 1912. BY HARPER a BROTHERS 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

PUBLISHED JANUARY. 1912 



©CI.A305426 



NO, 2 






A PERSONAL RECORD 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

As a general rule we do not want much 
encouragement to talk about ourselves; yet 
this little book is the result of a friendly sug- 
gestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. 
I defended myself with some spirit; but, with 
characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice in- 
sisted, "You know, you really must." 

It was not an argument, but I submitted 
at once. If one must! . . . 

You perceive the force of a word. He 
who wants to persuade should put his trust 
not in the right argument, but in the right 
word. The power of sound has always been 
greater than the power of sense. I don't 
say this by way of disparagement. It is 
better for mankind to be impressionable than 
reflective. Nothing humanely great — great, 
I mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives — 
has come from reflection. On the other hand, 
you cannot fail to see the power of mere 
words; such words as Glory, for instance, 
or Pity. I won't mention any more. They 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

are not far to seek. Shouted with persever- 
ance, with ardor, with conviction, these two 
by their sound alone have set whole na- 
tions in motion and upheaved the dry, hard 
ground on which rests our whole social fabric. 
There's "virtue" for you if you like! . . . 
Of course the accent must be attended to. 
The right accent. That's very important. 
The capacious lung, the thundering or the 
tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of 
your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent- 
minded person with a mathematical imagina- 
tion. Mathematics commands all my respect, 
but I have no use for engines. Give me the 
right word and the right accent and I will 
move the world. 

What a dream for a writer! Because 
written words have their accent too. Yes! 
Let me only find the right word! Surely it 
must be lying somewhere among the wreckage 
of all the plaints and all the exultations 
poured out aloud since the first day when 
hope, the undying, came down on earth. It 
may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, 
quite at hand. But it's no good. I believe 
there are men who can lay hold of a needle 
in a pottle of hay at the first try. For my- 
self, I have never had such luck. 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

And then there is that accent. Another 
difficulty. For who is going to tell whether 
the accent is right or wrong till the word is 
shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and 
goes down-wind, leaving the world unmoved? 
Once upon a time there lived an emperor 
who was a sage and something of a literary 
man. He jotted down on ivory tablets 
thoughts, maxims, reflections which chance 
has preserved for the edification of posterity. 
Among other sayings — I am quoting from 
memory — I remember this solemn admo- 
nition : * ' Let all thy words have the accent of 
heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! 
This is very fine, but I am thinking that it 
is an easy matter for an austere emperor to 
jot down grandiose advice. Most of the 
working truths on this earth are humble, not 
heroic : and there have been times in the his- 
tory of mankind when the accents of heroic 
truth have moved it to nothing but derision. 

Nobody will expect to find between the 
covers of this little book words of extraor- 
dinary potency or accents of irresistible 
heroism. However humiliating for my self- 
esteem, I must confess that the counsels of 
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are 
more fit for a moralist than for an artist. 

3 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, 
and also sincerity. That complete, praise- 
worthy sincerity which, while it delivers one 
into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely 
as not to embroil one with one's friends. 

"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an ex- 
pression. I can't imagine among either my 
enemies or my friends a being so hard up 
for something to do as to quarrel with me. 
"To disappoint one's friends" would be 
nearer the mark. Most, almost all, friend- 
ships of the writing period of my life have 
come to me through my books; and I know 
that a novelist lives in his work. He stands 
there, the only reality in an invented world, 
among imaginary things, happenings, and 
people. Writing about them, he is only 
writing about himself. But the disclosure is 
not complete. He remains, to a certain 
extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected 
rather than a seen presence — a movement 
and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. 
In these personal notes there is no such veil. 
And I cannot help thinking of a passage in 
the Imitation of Christ where the ascetic 
author, who knew Hfe so profoundly, says 
that "there are persons esteemed on their 
reputation who by showing themselves de- 

4 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

stroy the opinion one had of them." This 
is the danger incurred by an author of fiction 
who sets out to talk about himself without 
disguise. 

While these reminiscent pages were ap- 
pearing serially I was remonstrated with for 
bad economy; as if such writing were a form 
of self-indulgence wasting the substance of 
future volumes. It seems that I am not 
sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never 
wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six 
cannot bring himself to look upon his ex- 
istence and his experience, upon the sum of 
his thoughts, sensations, and emotions, upon 
his memories and his regrets, and the whole 
possession of his past, as only so much ma- 
terial for his hands. Once before, some three 
years ago, when I published The Mirror of 
the Sea, a volume of impressions and memo- 
ries, the same remarks were made to me. 
Practical remarks. But, truth to say, I have 
never understood the kind of thrift they 
recommend. I wanted to pay my tribute 
to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom 
I remain indebted for so much which has 
gone to make me what I am. That seemed 
to me the only shape in which I could offer 
it to their shades. There could not be a 

5 



) 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

question in my mind of anything else. It is 
quite possible that I am a bad economist; 
but it is certain that I am incorrigible. 

Having matured in the surroundings and 
under the special conditions of sea life, I have 
a special piety toward that form of my 
past; for its impressions were vivid, its ap- 
peal direct, its demands such as could be 
responded to with the natural elation of youth 
and strength equal to the call. There was 
nothing in them to perplex a young con- 
science. Having broken away from my ori- 
gins imder a storm of blame from every 
quarter which had the merest shadow of 
right to voice an opinion, removed by great 
distances from such natural affections as were 
still left to me, and even estranged, in a 
measure, from them by the totally unin- 
telligible character of the life which had 
seduced me so mysteriously from my alle- 
giance, I may safely say that through the 
blind force of circumstances the sea was to 
be all my world and the merchant service my 
only home for a long succession of years. 
No wonder, then, that in my two exclusively 
sea books — The Nigger of the Narcissus and 
The Mirror of the Sea (and in the few short 
sea stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon") — 

6 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

I have tried with an almost filial regard to 
render the vibration of life in the great world 
of waters, in the hearts of the simple men 
who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and 
also that something sentient which seems to 
dwell in ships — ^the creatures of their hands 
and the objects of their care. 

One's literary life must turn frequently for 
sustenance to memories and seek discourse 
with the shades, unless one has made up one's 
mind to write only in order to reprove man- 
kind for what it is, or praise it for what it 
is not, or — ^generally — to teach it how to 
behave. Being neither quarrelsome, nor a 
flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of 
these things, and I am prepared to put up 
serenely with the insignificance which at- 
taches to persons who are not meddlesome in 
some way or other. But resignation is not 
indifference. I would not like to be left 
standing as a mere spectator on the bank 
of the great stream carrying onward so many 
lives. I would fain claim for myself the fac- 
ulty of so much insight as can be expressed 
in a voice of sympathy and compassion. 

It seems to me that in one, at least, au- 
thoritative quarter of criticism I am suspected 
of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of 

7 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

facts — of what the French would call secheresse 
du coeur. Fifteen years of unbroken silence 
before praise or blame testify sufficiently to 
my respect for criticism, that fine flower of 
personal expression in the garden of letters. 
But this is more of a personal matter, reach- 
ing the man behind the work, and therefore 
it may be alluded to in a volume which is a 
personal note in the margin of the public page. 
Not that I feel hurt in the least. The charge 
— if it amounted to a charge at all — was made 
in the most considerate terms; in a tone of 
regret. 

My answer is that if it be true that every 
novel contains an element of autobiography 
— and this can hardly be denied, since the 
creator can only express himself in his creation 
— then there are some of us to whom an open 
display of sentiment is repugnant. I would 
not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It 
is often merely temperamental. But it is 
not always a sign of coldness. It may be 
pride. There can be nothing more humiliat- 
ing than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss 
the mark of either laughter or tears. Noth- 
ing more humiliating! And this for the rea- 
son that should the mark be missed, should 
the open display of emotion fail to move, 

8 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or 
contempt. No artist can be reproached for 
shrinking from a risk which only fools run 
to meet and only genius dare confront with 
impimity. In a task which mainly consists 
in laying one's soul more or less bare to the 
world, a regard for decency, even at the cost 
of success, is but the regard for one's own 
dignity which is inseparably united with the 
dignity of one's work. 

And then — it is very difficult to be whol- 
ly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The 
comic, when it is human, soon takes upon 
itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs 
(some only, not all, for it is the capacity for 
suffering which makes man august in the 
eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses 
which must be recognized with smiling com- 
passion as the common inheritance of us all. 
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each 
other, mingling their forms and their murmurs 
in the twilight of life as mysterious as an over- 
shadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness 
of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and 
still, on the distant edge of the horizon. 

Yes! I too would like to hold the magic 
wand giving that command over laughter and 
tears which is declared to be the highest 

9 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

achievement of imaginative literature. Only, 
to be a great magician one must surrender 
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, 
either outside or within one's breast. We 
have all heard of simple men selling their souls 
for love or power to some grotesque devil. 
The most ordinary intelligence can perceive 
without much reflection that anything of the 
sort is boimd to be a fool's bargain. I don't 
lay claim to particular wisdom because of 
my dislike and distrust of such transactions. 
It may be my sea training acting upon a 
natural disposition to keep good hold on the 
one thing really mine, but the fact is that I 
have a positive horror of losing even for one 
moving moment that full possession of my- 
self which is the first condition of good ser- 
vice. And I have carried my notion of good 
service from my earlier into my later existence. 
I, who have never sought in the written word 
anything else but a form of the Beautiful — 
I have carried over that article of creed from 
the decks of ships to the more circtmiscribed 
space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, 
I have become permanently imperfect in the 
eyes of the ineffable company of pure esthetes. 
As in political so in literary action a man 
wins friends for himself mostly by the passion 

lO 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

of his prejudices and by the consistent narrow- 
ness of his outlook. But I have never been 
able to love what was not lovable or hate what 
was not hateful out of deference for some gen- 
eral principle. Whether there be any courage 
in making this admission I know not. After 
the middle turn of life's way we consider 
dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So 
I proceed in peace to declare that I have 
always suspected in the effort to bring into 
play the extremities of emotions the debasing 
touch of insincerity. In order to move others 
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves 
to be carried away beyond the bounds of our 
normal sensibility — innocently enough, per- 
haps, and of necessity, like an actor who 
raises his voice on the stage above the pitch 
of natural conversation — but still we have to 
do that. And surely this is no great sin. 
But the danger lies in the writer becoming 
the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the 
exact notion of sincerity, and in the end 
coming to despise truth itself as something too 
cold, too blimt for his purpose — as, in fact, 
not good enough for his insistent emotion. 
From laughter and tears the descent is easy 
to sniveling and giggles. 

These may seem selfish considerations ; but 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

you can't, in soiind morals, condemn a man 
for taking care of his own integrity. It is 
his clear duty. And least of all can you 
condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly 
and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that 
interior world where his thought and his 
emotions go seeking for the experience of 
imagined adventures, there are no policemen, 
no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread 
of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who 
then is going to say Nay to his temptations 
if not his conscience? 

And besides — this, remember, is the place 
and the moment of perfectly open talk — I 
think that all ambitions are lawful except 
those which climb upward on the miseries or 
credulities of mankind. All intellectual and 
artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and 
even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. 
They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then 
so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as 
virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their 
own reward. Is it such a very mad presump- 
tion to believe in the sovereign power of one's 
art, to try for other means, for other ways 
of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal 
of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to 
be insensible. A historian of hearts is not 

12 



(/ 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates 
further, restrained as he may be, since his 
aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and 
tears. The sight of human affairs deserves 
admiration and pity. They are worthy of 
respect, too. And he is not insensible who 
pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a 
sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which 
is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not 
detached, but resignation open-eyed, con- 
scious, and informed by love, is the only one 
of our feelings for which it is impossible to 
become a sham. 

Not that I think resignation the last word 
of wisdom. I am too much the creature of 
my time for that. But I think that the 
proper wisdom is to will what the gods will 
without, perhaps, being certain what their 
will is — or even if they have a will of their 
own. And in this matter of life and art it is 
not the Why that matters so much to our 
happiness as the How. As the Frenchman 
said, " II y a toujours la maniere." Very true. 
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in 
laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations 
and enthusiasms, in judgments — and even in 
love. The manner in which, as in the 
features and character of a human face, the 
2 13 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

inner truth is foreshadowed for those who 
know how to look at their kind. 

Those who read me know my conviction 
that the world, the temporal world, rests on 
a few very simple ideas; so simple that they 
must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, 
among others, on the idea of Fidelity. At 
a time when nothing which is not revolu- 
tionary in some way or other can expect to 
attract much attention I have not been 
revolutionary in my writings. The revolu- 
tionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, 
that it frees one from all scruples as regards 
ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is re- 
pulsive to my mind by the menace of fanati- 
cism and intolerance it contains. No doubt 
one should smile at these things; but, im- 
perfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. 
All claim to special righteousness awakens in 
me that scorn and danger from which a 
philosophical mind should be free. . . . 

I fear that trying to be conversational I 
have only managed to be unduly discursive. 
I have never been very well acquainted with 
the art of conversation — that art which, I 
understand, is supposed to be lost now. My 
young days, the days when one's habits and 
character are formed, have been rather fa- 

14 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

miliar with long silences. Such voices as 
broke into them were anything but con- 
versational. No. I haven't got the habit. 
Yet this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to 
the handful of pages which follow. They, 
too, have been charged with discursiveness, 
with disregard of chronological order (which 
is in itself a crime), with unconventionality 
of form (which is an impropriety) . I was told 
severely that the public would view with 
displeasure the informal character of my 
recollections. ''Alas!" I protested, mildly. 
"Could I begin with the sacramental words, 
' I was born on such a date in such a place ' ? 
The remoteness of the locality would have 
robbed the statement of all interest. I haven't 
lived through wonderful adventures to be 
related seriatim. I haven't known distin- 
guished men on whom I could pass fatuous 
remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great 
or scandalous affairs. This is but a bit of 
psychological document, and even so, I haven't 
written it with a view to put forward any 
conclusion of my own." 

But my objector was not placated. These 
were good reasons for not writing at all — 
not a defense of what stood written already, 
he said. 

15 



A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

I admit that almost anything, anything 
in the world, would serve as a good reason 
for not writing at all. But since I have 
written them, all I want to say in their 
defense is that these memories put down 
without any regard for established conven- 
tions have not been thrown off without system 
and purpose. They have their hope and 
their aim. The hope that from the reading 
of these pages there may emerge at last the 
vision of a personality; the man behind the 
books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for 
instance, Almayer's Folly and The Secret 
Agent, and yet a coherent, justifiable per- 
sonality both in its origin and in its action. 
This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely 
associated with the hope, is to give the 
record of personal memories by presenting 
faithfully the feelings and sensations con- 
nected with the writing of my first book and 
with my first contact with the sea. 

In the purposely mingled resonance of this 
double strain a friend here and there will 
perhaps detect a subtle accord. 

J. C. K. 



A PERSONAL RECORD 



Books may be written in all sorts of 
places. Verbal inspiration may enter the 
berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast 
in a river in the middle of a town; and since 
saints are supposed to look benignantly on 
humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant 
fancy that the shade of old Flaubert — who 
imagined himself to be (among other things) 
a descendant of Vikings — might have hovered 
with amused interest over the docks of a 
2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board 
of which, gripped by the inclement winter 
alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter 
of Almayer^s Folly was begun. With interest, 
I say, for was not the kind Norman giant 
with enormous mustaches and a thundering 
voice the last of the Romantics? Was he 
not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic, devo- 
ir 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

tion to his art, a sort of literary, saint -like 
hermit? 

" '// has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, 
pointing to the hills behind which the sun had 
sunk.'' . . . These words of Almayer's ro- 
mantic daughter I remember tracing on the 
gray paper of a pad which rested on the 
blanket of my bed-place. They referred to 
a sunset in Malayan Isles and shaped them- 
selves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision 
of forests and rivers and seas, far removed 
from a commercial and yet romantic town of 
the northern hemisphere. But at that mo- 
ment the mood of visions and words was cut 
short by the third ofhcer, a cheerful and 
casual youth, coming in with a bang of the 
door and the exclamation: "You've made it 
jolly warm in here." 

It was warm. I had turned on the steam- 
heater after placing a tin under the leaky 
water-cock — for perhaps you do not know 
that water will leak where steam will not. 
I am not aware of what my young friend had 
been doing on deck all that morning, but 
the hands he rubbed together vigorously were 
very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling 
by their mere aspect. He has remained the 
only ban joist of my acquaintance, and being 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

also a younger son of a retired colonel, the 
poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange aberration 
of associated ideas, always seems to me to 
have been written with an exclusive view 
to his person. When he did not play the 
banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He pro- 
ceeded to this sentimental inspection, and 
after meditating a while over the strings under 
my silent scrutiny inquired, airily: 

"What are you always scribbling there, 
if it's fair to ask?" 

It was a fair enough question, but I did 
not answer him, and simply turned the pad 
over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: 
I could not have told him he had put to 
flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her 
opening speech of the tenth chapter, and the 
words of Mrs. Almayer 's wisdom which were 
to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical 
night. I could not have told him that Nina 
had said, " It has set at last." He would have 
been extremely surprised and perhaps have 
dropped his precious banjo. Neither could I 
have told him that the sun of my sea-going 
was setting too, even as I wrote the words 
expressing the impatience of passionate youth 
bent on its desire. I did not know this my- 
self, and it is safe to say he would not have 

19 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

cared, though he was an excellent young 
fellow and treated me with more deference 
than, in our relative positions, I was strictly 
entitled to. 

He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and 
I went on looking through the port-hole. 
The round opening framed in its brass rim 
a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks 
ranged on the frozen ground and the tail- 
end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in 
a blouse and a woolen night-cap leaned 
against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom- 
house guard, belted over his blue capote, had 
the air of being depressed by exposure to the 
weather and the monotony of official exist- 
ence. The background of grimy houses found 
a place in the picture framed by my port- 
hole, across a wide stretch of paved quay 
brown with frozen mud. The coloring was 
somber, and the most conspicuous feature 
was a little cafe with curtained windows and 
a shabby front of white woodwork, correspond- 
ing with the squalor of these poorer quarters 
bordering the river. We had been shifted 
down there from another berth in the neigh- 
borhood of the Opera House, where that same 
port-hole gave me a view of quite another 
sort of cafe — the best in the town, I believe. 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

and the very one where the worthy Bovary 
and his wife, the romantic daughter of old 
Pere Renault, had some refreshment after the 
memorable performance of an opera which 
was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor 
in a setting of light music. 

I could recall no more the hallucination of 
the Eastern Archipelago which I certainly 
hoped to see again. The story of Almayer's 
Folly got put away under the pillow for that 
day. I do not know that I had any occupa- 
tion to keep me away from it; the truth of 
the matter is that on board that ship we were 
leading just then a contemplative life. I will 
not say anything of my privileged position. 
I was there "just to oblige," as an actor of 
standing may take a small part in the benefit 
performance of a friend. 

As far as my feelings were concerned I did 
not wish to be in that steamer at that time 
and in those circumstances. And perhaps I 
was not even wanted there in the usual sense 
in which a ship "wants" an officer. It was 
the first and last instance in my sea life when 
I served ship-owners who have remained 
completely shadowy to my apprehension. I 
do not mean this for the well-known firm 
of London ship-brokers which had chartered 

21 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but 
ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport Com- 
pany. A death leaves something behind, but 
there was never anything tangible left from 
the F, C. T. C. It flourished no longer than 
roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed 
in the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint 
perfume of adventure, and died before spring 
set in. But indubitably it was a company, 
it had even a house-flag, all white with the 
letters F. C. T. C. artfully tangled up in a 
complicated monogram. We flew it at our 
mainmast head, and now I have come to the 
conclusion that it was the only flag of its 
kind in existence. All the same we on board, 
for many days, had the impression of being a 
unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures 
for Montreal and Quebec as advertised in 
pamphlets and prospectuses which came 
aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, 
London, just before we started for Rouen, 
France. And in the shadowy life of the 
F. C. T. C. lies the secret of that, my last 
employment in my calling, which in a remote 
sense interrupted the rhythmical development 
of Nina Almayer's story. 

The then secretary of the London Ship- 
masters' Society, with its modest rooms in 

22 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable 
activity and the greatest devotion to his 
task. He is responsible for what was my last 
association with a ship. I call it that be- 
cause it can hardly be called a sea-going 
experience. Dear Captain Froud — it is im- 
possible not to pay him the tribute of affec- 
tionate familiarity at this distance of years — 
had very sound views as to the advance- 
ment of knowledge and status for the whole 
body of the officers of the mercantile marine. 
He organized for us courses of professional 
lectures, St. John ambulance classes, corre- 
sponded industriously with public bodies and 
members of Parliament on subjects touching 
the interests of the service; and as to the 
oncoming of some inquiry or commission re- 
lating to matters of the sea and to the work 
of seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his 
need of exerting himself on our corporate 
behalf. Together with this high sense of his 
official duties he had in him a vein of personal 
kindness, a strong disposition to do what 
good he could to the individual members of 
that craft of which in his time he had been a 
very excellent master. And what greater 
kindness can one do to a seaman than to put 
him in the way of employment? Captain 

23 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Froud did not see why the Shipmasters' 
Society, besides its general guardianship of 
our interests, should not be unofficially an 
employment agency of the very highest class. 

"I am trying to persuade all our great 
ship-owning firms to come to us for their men. 
There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about 
our society, and I really don't see why they 
should not," he said once to me. "I am 
always telling the captains, too, that, all 
things being equal, they ought to give prefer- 
ence to the members of the society. In my 
position I can generally find for them what 
they want among our members or our asso- 
ciate members." 

In my wanderings about London from west 
to east and back again (I was very idle then) 
the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were 
a sort of resting-place where my spirit, hanker- 
ing after the sea, could feel itself nearer to the 
ships, the men, and the life of its choice — 
nearer there than on any other spot of the 
solid earth. This resting-place used to be, 
at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of 
men and tobacco smoke, but Captain Froud 
had the smaller room to himself and there he 
granted private interviews, whose principal 
mxOtive was to render service. Thus, one 

24 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

murky November afternoon he beckoned me 
in with a crooked finger and that peculiar 
glance above his spectacles which is perhaps 
my strongest physical recollection of the man. 

"I have had in here a shipmaster, this 
morning," he said, getting back to his desk 
and motioning me to a chair, ' ' who is in want 
of an officer. It's for a steamship. You 
know, nothing pleases me more than to be 
asked, but, unfortunately, I do not quite see 
my way . . ." 

As the outer room was full of men I cast 
a wondering glance at the closed door; but 
he shook his head. 

"Oh yes, I should be only too glad to get 
that berth for one of them. But the fact of 
the matter is, the captain of that ship wants 
an officer who can speak French fluently, and 
that's not so easy to find. I do not know 
anybody myself but you. It's a second 
officer's berth and, of course, you would not 
care . . . would you now? I know that it 
isn't what you are looking for." 

It was not. I had given myself up to the 
idleness of a haunted man who looks for 
nothing but words wherein to capture his 
visions. But I admit that outwardly I re- 
sembled sufficiently a man who could make 

25 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

a second officer for a steamer chartered by 
a French company. I showed no sign of 
being haunted by the fate of Nina and by 
the murmurs of tropical forests ; and even my 
intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person 
of weak character) had not put a visible 
mark upon my features. For many years 
he and the world of his story had been the 
companions of my imagination without, I 
hope, impairing my ability to deal with the 
realities of sea life. I had had the man and 
his surroundings with me ever since my re- 
turn from the eastern waters — some four years 
before the day of which I speak. 

It was in the front sitting-room of furnished 
apartments in a Pimlico square that they 
first began to live again with a vividness and 
poignancy quite foreign to our former real 
intercourse. I had been treating myself to a 
long stay on shore, and in the necessity of 
occupying my mornings Almayer (that old 
acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue. 
Before long, as was only proper, his wife and 
daughter joined him round my table, and then 
the rest of that Pantai band came full of 
words and gestures. Unknown to my re- 
spectable landlady, it was my practice directly 
after my breakfast to hold animated recep- 

26 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

tions of Malays, Arabs, and half-castes. They 
did not clamor aloud for my attention. 
They came with a silent and irresistible ap- 
peal — and the appeal, I affirm here, was not 
to my self-love or my vanity. It seems now 
to have had a moral character, for why 
should the memory of these beings, seen in 
their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand 
to express itself in the shape of a novel, except 
on the ground of that mysterious fellowship 
which unites in a community of hopes and 
fears all the dwellers on this earth? 

I did not receive my visitors with boisterous 
rapture as the bearers of any gifts of profit 
or fame. There was no vision of a printed 
book before me as I sat writing at that table, 
situated in a decayed part of Belgravia. 
After all these years, ea.ch leaving its evidence 
of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly 
say that it is a sentiment akin to pity which 
prompted me to render in words assembled 
with conscientious care the memory of things 
far distant and of men who had lived. 

But, coming back to Captain Froud and 
his fixed idea of never disappointing ship- 
owners or ship-captains, it was not likely 
that I should fail him in his ambition — to 
satisfy at a few hours' notice the unusual 

27 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

demand for a French-speaking officer. He 
explained to me that the ship was chartered 
by a French company intending to establish 
a regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, 
for the transport of French emigrants to 
Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did 
not interest me very much. I said gravely 
that if it were really a matter of keeping up 
the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society 
I would consider it. But the consideration 
was just for form's sake. The next day I 
interviewed the captain, and I believe we 
were impressed favorably with each other. 
He explained that his chief mate was an 
excellent man in every respect and that he 
could not think of dismissing him so as to 
give me the higher position; but that if I 
consented to come as second officer I would 
be given certain special advantages — and so 
on. 

I told him that if I came at all the rank 
really did not matter. 

"I am stire, " he insisted, "you will get 
on first rate with Mr. Paramor." 

I promised faithfully to stay for two trips 
at least, and it was in those circumstances 
that what was to be my last connection with 
a ship began. And after all there was not 

28 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

even one single trip. It may be that it was 
simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written 
word on my forehead which apparently for- 
bade me, through all my sea wanderings, ever 
to achieve the crossing of the Western Ocean 
— ^using the words in that special sense in 
which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, 
of Western Ocean packets, of Western Ocean 
hard cases. The new life attended closely 
upon the old, and the nine chapters of 
Almaye/s Folly went with me to the Vic- 
toria Dock, whence in a few days we started 
for Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that 
the engaging of a man fated never to cross 
the Western Ocean was the absolute cause 
of the Franco-Canadian Transport Company's 
failure to achieve even a single passage. It 
might have been that of course; but the 
obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of 
mone}'. Four hundred and sixty bimks for 
emigrants were put together in the 'tween 
decks by industrious carpenters while we lay 
in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant 
turned up in Rouen — of which, being a hu- 
mane person, I confess I was glad. Some 
gentlemen from Paris — I think there were 
three of them, and one was said to be the 
chairman — tiimed up, indeed, and went from 

3 29 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

end to end of the ship, knocking their silk 
hats cruelly against the deck beams. I at- 
tended them personally, and I can vouch for 
it that the interest they took in things was 
intelligent enough, though, obviously, they 
had never seen anything of the sort before. 
Their faces as they went ashore wore a cheer- 
fully inconclusive expression. Notwithstand- 
ing that this inspecting ceremony was sup- 
posed to be a preliminary to immediate sailing, 
it was then, as they filed down our gangway, 
that I received the inward monition that no 
sailing within the meaning of our charter 
party would ever take place. 

It must be said that in less than three 
weeks a move took place. When we first 
arrived we had been taken up with much 
ceremony well toward the center of the town, 
and, all the street corners being placarded 
with the tricolor posters announcing the 
birth of our company, the petit bourgeois with 
his wife and family made a Sunday holiday 
from the inspection of the ship. I was always 
in evidence in my best uniform to give in- 
formation as though I had been a Cook's 
tourists' interpreter, while our quartermasters 
reaped a harvest of small change from per- 
sonally conducted parties. But when the 

30 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

move was made — that m.ove which carried us 
some mile and a half down the stream to be 
tied up to an altogether muddier and shabbier 
quay — then indeed the desolation of solitude 
became our lot. It was a complete and sound- 
less stagnation ; for, as we had the ship ready 
for sea to the smallest detail, as the frost was 
hard and the days short, we were absolutely 
idle — idle to the point of blushing with shame 
when the thought struck us that all the time 
our salaries went on. Young Cole was ag- 
grieved because, as he said, we could not 
enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after 
loafing like this all day: even the banjo lost 
its charm since there was nothing to prevent 
his strumming on it all the time between the 
meals. The good Paramor — he was really a 
most excellent fellow — became unhappy as far 
as was possible to his cheery nature, till one 
dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, 
that he should employ the dormant energies of 
the crew in hauling both cables up on deck and 
turning them end for end. 

For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. 
"Excellent idea!" but directly his face fell. 
"Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that 
job last more than three days," he muttered, 
discontentedly. I don't know how long he 

31 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

expected us to be stuck on the riverside out- 
skirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables 
got hauled up and turned end for end accord- 
ing to my Satanic suggestion, put down again, 
and their very existence utterly forgotten, I 
believe, before a French river pilot came on 
board to take our ship down, empty as she 
came, into the Havre roads. You may think 
that this state of forced idleness favored some 
advance in the fortunes of Almayer and his 
daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were 
some sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin- 
mate's interruption, as related above, had 
arrested them short at the point of that fate- 
ful sunset for many weeks together. It was 
always thus with this book, begun in '89 and 
finished in '94 — with that shortest of all 
the novels which it was to be my lot to write. 
Between its opening exclamation calling Al- 
mayer to his dinner in his wife's voice and 
Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the 
God of Islam — "The Merciful, the Compassion- 
ate ' ' — which closes the book, there were to come 
several long sea passages, a visit (to use the 
elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) 
to the scenes (some of them) of my childhood 
and the realization of childhood's vain words, 
expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim. 

32 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

It was in 1868, when nine years old or 
thereabouts, that while looking at a map of 
Africa of the time and putting my finger on 
the blank space then representing the un- 
solved mystery of that continent, I said to 
myself, with absolute assurance and an amaz- 
ing audacity which are no longer in my 
character now: 

"When I grow up I shall go there ^ 
And of course I thought no more about 
it till after a quarter of a century or so an 
opportunity offered to go there — as if the 
sin of childish audacity were to be visited on 
my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there 
being the region of Stanley Falls, which in 
'68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the 
earth's figured surface. And the MS. of 
Almayer's Folly, carried about me as if it 
were a talisman or a treasure, went there too. 
That it ever came out of there seems a special 
dispensation of Providence, because a good 
many of my other properties, infinitely more 
valuable and useful to me, remained behind 
through unfortunate accidents of transporta- 
tion. I call to mind, for instance, a specially 
awkward turn of the Congo between Kin- 
chassa and Leopoldsville — ^more partictilarly 
when one had to take it at night in a big canoe 

33 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

with only half the proper number of paddlers. 
I failed in being the second white man on 
record drowned at that interesting spot 
through the upsetting of a canoe. The first 
was a young Belgian officer, but the accident 
happened some months before my time, and 
he, too, I believe, was going home; not per- 
haps quite so ill as myself — but still he was 
going home. I got round the turn more or 
less alive, though I was too sick to care 
whether I did or not, and, always with Al- 
mayer's Folly among my diminishing baggage, 
I arrived at that delectable capital, Boma, 
where, before the departure of the steamer 
which was to take me home, I had the time 
to wish myself dead over and over again with 
perfect sincerity. At that date there were 
in existence only seven chapters of Almayers 
Folly, but the chapter in my history which 
followed was that of a long, long illness and 
very dismal convalescence. Geneva, or more 
precisely the hydropathic establishment of 
Champel, is rendered forever famous by the 
termination of the eighth chapter in the 
history of Almayer's decline and fall. The 
events of the ninth are inextricably mixed up 
with the details of the proper management 
of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain 

34 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

city firm whose name does not matter. But 
that work, undertaken to accustom myself 
again to the activities of a healthy existence, 
soon came to an end. The earth had nothing 
to hold me with for very long. And then 
that memorable story, like a cask of choice 
Madeira, got carried for three years to and 
fro upon the sea. Whether this treatment 
improved its flavor or not, of course I would 
not like to say. As far as appearance is 
concerned it certainly did nothing of the kind. 
The whole MS. acquired a faded look and an 
ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at 
last unreasonable to suppose that anything 
in the world would ever happen to Almayer 
and Nina. And yet something most unlikely 
to happen on the high seas was to wake them 
up from their state of suspended animation. 
What is it that Novalis says: "It is certain 
my conviction gains infinitely the moment an- 
other soul will believe in it." And what is a 
novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's 
existence strong enough to take upon itself 
a form of imagined life clearer than reality 
and whose accumulated verisimilitude of se- 
lected episodes puts to shame the pride of 
documentary history. Providence which saved 
my MS. from the Congo rapids brought it to 

35 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the 
open sea. It would be on my part the greatest 
ingratitude ever to forget the sallow, sunken 
face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young 
Cambridge man (he was a " passenger for his 
health" on board the good ship Torrens out- 
ward bound to Australia) who was the first 
reader of Almayer's Folly — the very first 
reader I ever had. "Would it bore you very 
much in reading a MS. in a handwriting like 
mine?" I asked him one evening, on a sudden 
impulse at the end of a longish conversation 
whose subject was Gibbon's History. Jacques 
(that was his name) was sitting in my cabin 
one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing 
me a book to read from his own traveling 
store. 

"Not at all," he answered, with his courte- 
ous intonation and a faint smile. As I pulled 
a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity 
gave him a watchful expression. I wonder 
what he expected to see. A poem, maybe. 
All that's beyond guessing now. He was 
not a cold, but a calm man, still more subdued 
by disease — a man of few words and of an 
unassuming modesty in general intercourse, 
but with something uncommon in the whole 
of his person which set him apart from the 

36 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. 
His eyes had a thoughtful, introspective look. 
In his attractive reserved manner and in a 
veiled sympathetic voice he asked: 

"What is this?" "It is a sort of tale," 
I answered, with an effort. "It is not even 
finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to 
know what you think of it." He put the 
MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I 
remember perfectly his thin, brown fingers 
folding it lengthwise. "I will read it to- 
morrow," he remarked, seizing the door- 
handle ; and then watching the roll of the ship 
for a propitious moment, he opened the door 
and was gone. In the moment of his exit 
I heard the sustained booming of the wind, 
the swish of the water on the decks of the 
Torrens, and the subdued, as if distant, roar 
of the rising sea. I noted the growing dis- 
quiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, 
and responded professionally to it with the 
thought that at eight o'clock, in another half- 
hour or so at the farthest, the topgallant- 
sails would have to come off the ship. 

Next day, but this time in the first dog- 
watch, Jacques entered my cabin. He had a 
thick woolen muffler round his throat, and 
the MS. was in his hand. He tendered it to 

37 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

me with a steady look, but without a word. 
I took it in silence. He sat down on the 
couch and still said nothing. I opened and 
shut a drawer under my desk, on which a 
filled-up log-slate lay wide open in its wooden 
frame waiting to be copied neatly into the 
sort of book I was accustomed to write with 
care, the ship's log-book. I turned my back 
squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques 
never offered a word. "Well, what do you 
say ? " I asked at last . " Is it worth finishing ? ' ' 
This question expressed exactly the whole of 
my thoughts. 

"Distinctly," he answered, in his sedate, 
veiled voice, and then coughed a little. 

"Were you interested?" I inquired further, 
almost in a whisper. 

"Very much!" 

In a pause I went on meeting instinctively 
the heavy rolling of the ship, and Jacques 
put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of 
my bed-place swung to and fro as if it were 
a punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its 
gimbals, and now and then the cabin door 
rattled slightly in the gusts of wind. It was 
in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the longi- 
tude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, 
that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's 

38 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

resurrection were taking place. In the pro- 
longed silence it occurred to me that there was 
a good deal of retrospective writing in the 
story as far as it went. Was it intelligible 
in its action, I asked myself, as if already the 
story-teller were being born into the body of 
a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle 
of the officer of the watch and remained on 
the alert to catch the order that was to 
follow this call to attention. It reached me 
as a faint, fierce shout to "Square the yards." 
"Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly 
blow coming on." Then I turned to my very 
first reader, who, alas! was not to live long 
enough to know the end of the tale. 

"Now let me ask you one more thing: 
is the story quite clear to you as it stands?" 

He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face 
and seemed surprised. 

"Yes! Perfectly." 

This was all I was to hear from his lips 
concerning the merits of Almayers Folly. 
We never spoke together of the book again. 
A long period of bad weather set in and I 
had no thoughts left but for my duties, while 
poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to 
keep close in his cabin. When we arrived in 
Adelaide the first reader of my prose went at 

39 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

once up-country, and died rather suddenly in 
the end, either in AustraHa or it may be on the 
passage while going home through the Suez 
Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and 
I do not think I ever heard precisely; though 
I made inquiries about him from some of our 
return passengers who, wandering about to 
"see the country" during the ship's stay 
in port, had come upon him here and there. 
At last we sailed, homeward bound, and 
still not one line was added to the careless 
scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques 
had had the patience to read with the very 
shadows of Eternity gathering already in the 
hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes. 

The purpose instilled into me by his simple 
and final "Distinctly" remained dormant, yet 
alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I 
am compelled — unconsciously compelled — now 
to write volume after volume, as in past years 
I was compelled to go to sea voyage after 
voyage. Leaves must follow upon one another 
as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, 
on and on to the appointed end, which, being 
Truth itself, is One — one for all men and for 
all occupations. 

I do not know which of the two impulses 
has appeared more mysterious and more 

40 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in go- 
ing to sea, I had to wait my opportunity. 
Let me confess here that I was never one 
of those wonderful fellows that would go 
afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, 
and, if I may pride myself upon my consis- 
tency, it was ever just the same with my 
writing. Some men, I have heard, write in 
railway carriages, and could do it, perhaps, 
sitting crossed-legged on a clothes-line; but 
I must confess that my sybaritic disposition 
will not consent to write without something 
at least resembling^ a chair. Line by line, 
rather than page by page, was the growth of 
Almayer's Folly. 

And so it happened that I very nearly lost 
the MS., advanced now to the first words 
of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse 
railway station (that's in Berlin, you know), 
on my way to Poland, or more precisely to 
Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning chang- 
ing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag 
in a refreshment-room. A worthy and intel- 
ligent Koffertrdger rescued it. Yet in my 
anxiety I was not thinking of the MS., but 
of all the other things that were packed in the 
bag. 

In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those 
41 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

wandering pages were never exposed to the 
light, except once to candle-Hght, while the 
bag lay open on the chair. I was dressing 
hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A friend 
of my childhood (he had been in the Diplo- 
matic Service, but had turned to growing 
wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen 
each other for over twenty years) was sitting 
on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off 
there. 

"You might tell me something of your life 
while you are dressing," he suggested, kindly. 

I do not think I told him much of my life- 
story either then or later. The talk of the 
select little party with which he made me 
dine was extremely animated and embraced 
most subjects under heaven, from big -game 
shooting in Africa to the last poem published 
in a very modernist review, edited by the 
very young and patronized by the highest 
society. But it never touched upon Almayer's 
Folly, and next morning, in uninterrupted 
obscurity, this inseparable companion went 
on rolling with me in the southeast direction 
toward the government of Kiev. 

At that time there was an eight hours' 
drive, if not more, from the railway station to 
the country-house which was my destination. 

42 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"Dear boy" (these words were always 
written in English), so ran the last letter 
from that house received in London — "Get 
yourself driven to the only inn in the place, 
dine as well as you can, and some time in the 
evening my own confidential servant, facto- 
tum and majordomo, a Mr. V. S. (I warn you 
he is of noble extraction), will present him- 
self before you, reporting the arrival of the 
small sledge which will take you here on the 
next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, 
which I suppose with such overcoats as you 
may have with you will keep you from 
freezing on the road." 

Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a 
Hebrew waiter, in an enormous barn-like 
bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door 
opened and, in a traveling costume of long 
boots, big sheepskin cap, and a short coat 
girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V. S. (of 
noble extraction), a man of about thirty- 
five, appeared with an air of perplexity on 
his open and must ached countenance. I 
got up from the table and greeted him in 
Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of con- 
sideration demanded by his noble blood and 
his confidential position. His face cleared 
up in a wonderful way. It appeared that, 

43 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

notwithstanding my uncle's earnest assur- 
ances, the good fellow had remained in doubt 
of our tmderstanding each other. He imag- 
ined I would talk to him in some foreign 
language. I was told that his last words on 
getting into the sledge to come to meet me 
shaped an anxious exclamation: 

"Well! Well! Here I am going, but God 
only knows how I am to make myself under- 
stood to our master's nephew." 

We understood each other very well from 
the first. He took charge of me as if I were 
not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish 
feeling of coming home from school when he 
mufHed me up next morning in an enormous 
bearskin traveling - coat and took his seat 
protectively by my side. The sledge was a 
very small one, and it looked utterly insig- 
nificant, almost like a toy behind the four 
big bays harnessed two and two. We three, 
counting the coachman, filled it completely. 
He was a young fellow with clear blue eyes; 
the high collar of his livery fur coat framed 
his cheery coimtenance and stood all round 
level with the top of his head. 

"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed 
him, "do you think we shall manage to get 
home before six?" His answer was that we 

44 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

would surely, with God's help, and providing 
there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch 
between certain villages whose names came 
with an extremely familiar sound to my ears. 
He turned out an excellent coachman, with 
an instinct for keeping the road among the 
snow- covered fields and a natural gift of 
getting the best out of his horses. 

"He is the son of that Joseph that I sup- 
pose the Captain remembers. He who used 
to drive the Captain's late grandmother of 
holy memory," remarked V. S., busy tucking 
fur rugs about my feet. 

I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph 
who used to drive my grandmother. Why! 
he it was who let me hold the reins for the 
first time in my life and allowed me to play 
with the great four-in-hand whip outside the 
doors of the coach-house. 

"What became of him?" I asked. "He 
is no longer serving, I suppose." 

"He served our master," was the reply. 
' ' But he died of cholera ten years ago now — 
that great epidemic that we had. And his wife 
died at the same time — the whole houseful 
of them, and this is the only boy that was left." 

The MS. of Almayer's Folly was reposing 
in the bag under our feet. 

4 45 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I saw again the sun setting on the plains 
as I saw it in the travels of my childhood. 
It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow 
in full view as if it were setting on the sea. 
It was twenty-three years since I had seen 
the sun set over that land; and we drove on 
in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the 
livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of 
a white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged 
up black shapes, the clumps of trees about 
a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage 
or two glided by, a low interminable wall, 
and then, glimmering and winking through a 
screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's 
house. 

That very evening the wandering MS. of 
Almaye/s Folly was unpacked and unosten- 
tatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, 
the guest-room which had been, I was in- 
formed in an affectionately careless tone, 
awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It 
attracted no attention from the affectionate 
presence hovering round the son of the fa- 
vorite sister. 

"You won't have many hours to your- 
self while you are staying with me, brother," 
he said — this form of address borrowed from 
the speech of our peasants being the usual 

46 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

expression of the highest good humor in a 
moment of affectionate elation. "I shall be 
always coming in for a chat." 

As a matter of fact, we had the whole house 
to chat in, and were everlastingly intruding 
upon each other. I invaded the retirement of 
his study where the principal feature was a 
colossal silver inkstand presented to him on 
his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his 
wards then living. He had been guardian of 
many orphans of land-owning families from 
the three southern provinces — ever since the 
year 1 860. Some of them had been my school- 
fellows and playmates, but not one of them, 
girls or boys, that I know of has ever written 
a novel. One or two were older than myself 
— considerably older, too. One of them, a 
visitor I remember in my early years, was the 
man who first put me on horseback, and his 
four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horse- 
manship and general skill in manly exercises, 
was one of my earliest admirations. I seem 
to remember my mother looking on from 
a colonnade in front of the dining-room 
windows as I was lifted upon the pony, 
held, for all I know, by the very Joseph — 
the groom attached specially to my grand- 
mother's service — who died of cholera. It 

47 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

was certainly a young man in a dark-blue, 
tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that 
being the livery of the men about the stables. 
It must have been in 1864, but reckoning 
by another mode of calculating time, it was 
certainly in the year in which my mother 
obtained permission to travel south and visit 
her family, from the exile into which she had 
followed my father. For that, too, she had 
had to ask permission, and I know that one of 
the conditions of that favor was that she 
should be treated exactly as a condemned 
exile herself. Yet a couple of years later, in 
memory of her eldest brother, who had served 
in the Guards and dying early left hosts of 
friends and a loved memory in the great 
world of St. Petersburg, some influential per- 
sonages procured for her this permission — it 
was officially called the "Highest Grace" — 
of a four months' leave from exile. 

This is also the year in which I first begin 
to remember my mother with more distinct- 
ness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, 
protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort 
of commanding sweetness; and I also re- 
member the great gathering of all the relations 
from near and far, and the gray heads of the 
family friends paying her the homage of 

48 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

respect and love in the house of her favorite 
brother, who, a few years later, was to take 
the place for me of both my parents. 

I did not understand the tragic significance 
of it all at the time, though, indeed, I remember 
that doctors also came. There were no signs 
of invalidism about her — but I think that al- 
ready they had pronounced her doom unless 
perhaps the change to a southern climate 
could re-establish her declining strength. For 
me it seems the very happiest period of my 
existence. There was my cousin, a delight- 
ful, quick-tempered little girl, some months 
younger than myself, whose life, lovingly 
watched over as if she were a royal princess, 
came to an end with her fifteenth year. 
There were other children, too, many of 
whom are dead now, and not a few whose 
very names I have forgotten. Over all this 
hung the oppressive shadow of the great 
Russian empire — the shadow lowering with 
the darkness of a new-born national hatred 
fostered by the Moscow school of journalists 
against the Poles after the ill-omened rising 
of 1863. 

This is a far cry back from the MS. of 
Almayer's Folly, but the public record of 
these formative impressions is not the whim 

49 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of an uneasy egotism. These, too, are things 
human, already distant in their appeal. It 
is meet that something more should be left 
for the novelist's children than the colors and 
figures of his own hard- won creation. That 
which in their grown-up years may appear 
to the world about them as the most enigmatic 
side of their natures and perhaps must remain 
forever obscure even to themselves, will be 
their unconscious response to the still voice 
of that inexorable past from which his work 
of fiction and their personalities are remotely 
derived. 

Only in men's imagination does every 
truth find an effective and undeniable exist- 
ence. Imagination, not invention, is the 
supreme master of art as of life. An imagina- 
tive and exact rendering of authentic memo- 
ries may serve worthily that spirit of piety 
toward all things human which sanctions the 
conceptions of a writer of tales, and the 
emotions of the man reviewing his own 
experience. 



II 



As I have said, I was unpacking my lug- 
gage after a journey from London into 
Ukraine. The MS. of Almayer's Folly — my 
companion already for some three years or 
more, and then in the ninth chapter of its 
age — ^was deposited unostentatiously on the 
writing-table placed between two windows. 
It didn't occur to me to put it away in the 
drawer the table was fitted with, but my eye 
was attracted by the good form of the same 
drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra, with 
four candles each, lighted up festally the room 
which had waited so many years for the 
wandering nephew. The blinds were down. 

Within five hundred yards of the chair on 
which I sat stood the first peasant hut of the 
village — part of my maternal grandfather's 
estate, the only part remaining in the posses- 
sion of a member of the family; and beyond 
the village in the limitless blackness of a win- 
ter's night there lay the great unfenced fields — 
not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread- 

51 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

giving land of low rounded ridges, all white 
now, with the black patches of timber nestling 
in the hollows. The road by which I had 
come ran through the village with a turn just 
outside the gates closing the short drive. 
Somebody was abroad on the deep snow- 
track; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually 
into the stillness of the room like a tuneful 
whisper. 

My unpacking had been watched over by 
the servant who had come to help me, and, 
for the most part, had been standing atten- 
tive but unnecessary at the door of the room. 
I did not want him in the least, but I did not 
like to tell him to go away. He was a young 
fellow, certainly more than ten years younger 
than myself; I had not been — I won't say in 
that place, but within sixty miles of it, ever 
since the year '67; yet his guileless physiog- 
nomy of the open peasant type seemed 
strangely familiar. It was quite possible 
that he might have been a descendant, a son, 
or even a grandson, of the servants whose 
friendly faces had been familiar to me in my 
early childhood. As a matter of fact he had 
no such claim on my consideration. He was 
the product of some village near by and 
was there on his promotion, having learned 

52 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the service in one or two houses as pantry- 
boy. I know this because I asked the worthy 

V next day. I might well have spared the 

question. I discovered before long that all 
the faces about the house and all the faces in 
the village: the grave faces with long mus- 
taches of the heads of families, the downy 
faces of the young men, the faces of the little 
fair-haired children, the handsome, tanned, 
wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the 
doors of the huts, were as familiar to me as 
though I had known them all from childhood 
and my childhood were a matter of the day 
before yesterday. 

The tinkle of the traveler's bells, after 
growing louder, had faded away quickly, and 
the tumult of barking dogs in the village had 
calmed down at last. My uncle, lounging in 
the corner of a small couch, smoked his long 
Turkish chibouk in silence. 

"This is an extremely nice writing-table 
you have got for my room," I remarked. 

"It is really your property," he said, 
keeping his eyes on me, with an interested 
and wistful expression, as he had done ever 
since I had entered the house. "Forty years 
ago your mother used to write at this very 
table. In otir house in Oratow, it stood in 

S3 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the little sitting-room which, by a tacit ar- 
rangement, was given up to the girls — I mean 
to your mother and her sister who died so 
young. It was a present to them jointly 
from your uncle Nicholas B. when your 
mother was seventeen and your aunt two 
years younger. She was a very dear, de- 
lightful girl, that aunt of yours, of whom I 
suppose you know nothing more than the 
name. She did not shine so much by per- 
sonal beauty and a cultivated mind, in which 
your mother was far superior. It was her 
good sense, the admirable sweetness of her 
nature, her exceptional facility and ease in 
daily relations, that endeared her to every- 
body. Her death was a terrible grief and a 
serious moral loss for us all. Had she lived 
she would have brought the greatest blessings 
to the house it would have been her lot to 
enter, as wife, mother, and mistress of a 
household. She would have created roimd 
herself an atmosphere of peace and content 
which only those who can love imselfishly 
are able to evoke. Your mother — of far 
greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished 
in person, manner, and intellect — had a less 
easy disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted, 
she also expected more from life. At that 

54 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

trying time especially, we were greatly con- 
cerned about her state. Suffering in her 
health from the shock of her father's death 
(she was alone in the house with him when 
he died suddenly), she was torn by the in- 
ward struggle between her love for the man 
whom she was to marry in the end and her 
knowledge of her dead father's declared 
objection to that match. Unable to bring 
herself to disregard that cherished memory 
and that judgment she had always respected 
and trusted, and, on the other hand, feeling 
the impossibility to resist a sentiment so 
deep and so true, she could not have been 
expected to preserve her mental and moral 
balance. At war with herself, she could 
not give to others that feeling of peace 
which was not her own. It was only later, 
when united at last with the man of her 
choice, that she developed those uncommon 
gifts of mind and heart which compelled 
the respect and admiration even of our 
foes. Meeting with calm fortitude the cruel 
trials of a life reflecting all the national and 
social misfortunes of the community, she 
realized the highest conceptions of duty as 
a wife, a mother, and a patriot, sharing the 
exile of her husband and representing nobly 

55 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our uncle 
Nicholas was not a man very accessible to 
feelings of affection. Apart from his wor- 
ship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really, 
I believe, only three people in the world: 
his mother — your great-grandmother, whom 
you have seen but cannot possibly remem- 
ber; his brother, our father, in whose house 
he lived for so many years; and of all of 
us, his nephews and nieces grown up around 
him, your mother alone. The modest, lov- 
able qualities of the youngest sister he did 
not seem able to see. It was I who felt 
most profoundly this unexpected stroke of 
death falling upon the family less than a 
year after I had become its head. It was 
terribly unexpected. Driving home one win- 
try afternoon to keep me company in our 
empty house, where I had to remain per- 
manently administering the estate and at- 
tending to the complicated affairs — (the girls 
took it in turn week and week about) — 
driving, as I said, from the house of the 
Countess Tekla Potocka, where our invalid 
mother was staying then to be near a doctor, 
they lost the road and got stuck in a snow- 
drift. She was alone with the coachman and 
old Valery, the personal servant of our late 

S6 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

father. Impatient of delay while they were 
trying to dig themselves out, she jumped out 
of the sledge and went to look for the road 
herself. All this happened in '51, not ten 
miles from the house in which we are sit- 
ting now. The road was soon found, but 
snow had begun to fall thickly again, and 
they were four more hours getting home. 
Both the men took off their sheepskin- 
lined greatcoats and used all their own rugs 
to wrap her up against the cold, notwith- 
standing her protests, positive orders, and 
even struggles, as Valery afterward related 
to me. 'How could I,' he remonstrated with 
her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late 
master if I let any harm come to you while 
there's a spark of life left in my body?' 
When they reached home at last the poor 
old man was stiff and speechless from ex- 
posure, and the coachman was in not much 
better plight, though he had the strength to 
drive round to the stables himself. To my 
reproaches for venturing out at all in such 
weather, she answered, characteristically, that 
she could not bear the thought of abandon- 
ing me to my cheerless solitude. It is in- 
comprehensible how it was that she was 
allowed to start. I suppose it had to be! 

57 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

She made light of the cough which came on 
next day, but shortly afterward inflamma- 
tion of the lungs set in, and in three weeks 
she was no more! She was the first to be 
taken away of the young generation under 
my care. Behold the vanity of all hopes and 
fears! I was the most frail at birth of all 
the children. For years I remained so deli- 
cate that my parents had but little hope of 
bringing me up; and yet I have survived 
five brothers and two sisters, and many of 
my contemporaries; I have outlived my wife 
and daughter, too — and from all those who 
have had some knowledge at least of these 
old times you alone are left. It has been 
my lot to lay in an early grave many honest 
hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes 
full of life." 

He got up bruskly, sighed, and left me, 
saying, "We will dine in half an hour." 
Without moving, I listened to his quick 
steps resounding on the waxed floor of the 
next room, traversing the anteroom lined 
with bookshelves, where he paused to put 
his chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing 
into the drawing-room (these were all en 
suite), where he became inaudible on the 
thick carpet. But I heard the door of his 

58 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

study-bedroom close. He was then sixty- 
two years old and had been for a quarter 
of a century the wisest, the firmest, the most 
indulgent of guardians, extending over me a 
paternal care and affection, a moral support 
which I seemed to feel always near me in the 
most distant parts of the earth. 

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 
1808, lieutenant of 18 13 in the French army, 
and for a short time Officier d' Ordonnance 
of Marshal Marmont; afterward captain in 
the 2d Regiment of Mounted Rifles in the 
Polish army — such as it existed up to 1830 
in the reduced kingdom established by the 
Congress of Vienna — I must say that from 
all that more distant past, known to me 
traditionally and a little de visu, and called 
out by the words of the man just gone away, 
he remains the most incomplete figure. It 
is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, 
for it is certain that he would not have 
missed the opportunity of seeing my mother 
for what he must have known would be the 
last time. From my early boyhood to this 
day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of 
mist rises before my eyes, mist in which I 
perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed head of 
white hair (which is exceptional in the case 

59 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of the B. family, where it is the rule for 
men to go bald in a becoming manner, before 
thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, 
a feature in strict accordance with the 
physical tradition of the B. family. But 
it is not by these fragmentary remains of 
perishable mortality that he lives in my 
memory. I knew, at a very early age, that 
my granduncle Nicholas B. was a Knight 
of the Legion of Honor and that he had also 
the Polish Cross for valor Virtuti Militari. 
The knowledge of these glorious facts in- 
spired in me an admiring veneration; yet 
it is not that sentiment, strong as it was, 
which resumes for me the force and the 
significance of his personality. It is over- 
borne by another and complex impression of 
awe, compassion, and horror. Mr. Nicholas 
B. remains for me the unfortunate and miser- 
able (but heroic) being who once upon a time 
had eaten a dog. 

It is a good forty years since I heard the 
tale, and the effect has not worn off yet. 
I believe this is the very first, say, realistic, 
story I heard in my life; but all the same I 
don't know why I should have been so 
frightfully impressed. Of course I know 
what our village dogs look like — but still. 

60 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

. . . No! At this very day, recalling the 
horror and compassion of my childhood, I 
ask myself whether I am right in disclosing 
to a cold and fastidious world that awful 
episode in the family history. I ask myself 
— is it right? — especially as the B. family had 
always been honorably known in a wide 
coimtry-side for the delicacy of their tastes 
in the matter of eating and drinking. But 
upon the whole, and considering that this 
gastronomical degradation overtaking a gal- 
lant young officer lies really at the door of 
the Great Napoleon, I think that to cover it 
up by silence would be an exaggeration of 
literary restraint. Let the truth stand here. 
The responsibility rests with the Man of 
St. Helena in view of his deplorable levity 
in the conduct of the Russian campaign. It 
was during the memorable retreat from Mos- 
cow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of 
two brother officers — as to whose morality 
and natural refinement I know nothing — 
bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village 
and subsequently devoured him. As far as 
I can remember the weapon used was a 
cavalry saber, and the issue of the sporting 
episode was rather more of a matter of life 
and death than if it had been an encounter 
5 6i 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

with a tiger. A picket of Cossacks was 
sleeping in that village lost in the depths of 
the great Lithuanian forest. The three sports- 
men had observed them from a hiding-place 
making themselves very much at home among 
the huts just before the early winter darkness 
set in at four o'clock. They had observed 
them with disgust and, perhaps, with despair. 
Late in the night the rash counsels of hunger 
overcame the dictates of prudence. Crawling 
through the snow they crept up to the fence 
of dry branches which generally encloses a 
village in that part of Lithuania. What they 
expected to get and in what manner, and 
whether this expectation was worth the risk, 
goodness only knows. However, these Cos- 
sack parties, in most cases wandering without 
an officer, were known to guard themselves 
badly and often not at all. In addition, the 
village lying at a great distance from the line 
of French retreat, they could not suspect the 
presence of stragglers from the Grand Army. 
The three officers had strayed away in a 
blizzard from the main column and had been 
lost for days in the woods, which explains 
sufficiently the terrible straits to which they 
were reduced. Their plan was to try and 
attract the attention of the peasants in that 

62 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

one of the huts which was nearest to the en- 
closure; but as they were preparing to ven- 
ture into the very jaws of the Hon, so to 
speak, a dog (it is mighty strange that there 
was but one), a creature quite as formidable 
under the circumstances as a lion, began to 
bark on the other side of the fence. . . . 

At this stage of the narrative, which I 
heard many times (by request) from the 
lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, 
my grandmother, I used to tremble with 
excitement. 

The dog barked. And if he had done no 
more than bark, three officers of the Great 
Napoleon's army would have perished hon- 
orably on the points of Cossacks' lances, 
or perchance escaping the chase would have 
died decently of starvation. But before they 
had time to think of running away that 
fatal and revolting dog, being carried away 
by the excess of the zeal, dashed out through 
a gap in the fence. He dashed out and died. 
His head, I understand, was severed at one 
blow from his body. I understand also that 
later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the 
snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hol- 
low, a fire had been lit by the party, the 
condition of the quarry was discovered to 

63 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

be distinctly unsatisfactory. It was not thin 
— on the contrary, it seemed unhealthily 
obese; its skin showed bare patches of an 
unpleasant character. However, they had 
not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. 
He was large. . . . He was eaten. . . . The 
rest is silence. . . . 

A silence in which a small boy shudders 
and says firmly: 

"I cotild not have eaten that dog." 
And his grandmother remarks with a smile : 
"Perhaps you don't know what it is to 
be hungry." 

I have learned something of it since. Not 
that I have been reduced to eat dog. I have 
fed on the emblematical animal, which, in 
the language of the volatile Gauls, is called 
la vache enragee; I have lived on ancient salt 
junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, 
of snake, of nondescript dishes containing 
things without a name — ^but of the Lithua- 
nian village dog — never! I wish it to be dis- 
tinctly understood that it is not I, but my 
granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed 
gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, etc., 
who, in his yoimg days, had eaten the Lith- 
uanian dog. 

I wish he had not. The childish horror 
64 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of the deed clings absurdly to the grizzled 
man. I am perfectly helpless against it. 
Still, if he really had to, let us charitably 
remember that he had eaten him on active 
service, while bearing up bravely against 
the greatest military disaster of modern his- 
tory, and, in a manner, for the sake of his 
country. He had eaten him to appease his 
hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of 
an unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the 
glow of a great faith that lives still, and in 
the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like 
a false beacon by a great man to lead astray 
the effort of a brave nation. 

Pro patriaf 

Looked at in that light, it appears a sweet 
and decorous meal. 

And looked at in the same light, my own 
diet of la vache enragee appears a fatuous 
and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for 
why should I, the son of a land which such 
men as these have turned up with their 
plowshares and bedewed with their blood, 
undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of 
salt junk and hardtack upon the wide seas? 
On the kindest view it seems an imanswer- 
able question. Alas! I have the conviction 
that there are men of imstained rectitude 

6s 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

who are ready to murmur scornfully the 
word desertion. Thus the taste of innocent 
adventure may be made bitter to the palate. 
The part of the inexplicable should be al- 
lowed for in appraising the conduct of men 
in a world where no explanation is final. 
No charge of faithlessness ought to be light- 
ly uttered. The appearances of this perish- 
able life are deceptive, like everything that 
falls under the judgment of our imperfect 
senses. The inner voice may remain true 
enough in its secret counsel. The fidelity 
to a special tradition may last through the 
events of an unrelated existence, following 
faithfully, too, the traced way of an inex- 
plicable impulse. 

It would take too long to explain the in- 
timate alliance of contradictions in human 
nature which makes love itself wear at times 
the desperate shape of betrayal. And per- 
haps there is no possible explanation. In- 
dulgence — as somebody said — is the most 
intelligent of all the virtues. I venture to 
think that it is one of the least common, 
if not the most uncommon of all. I would 
not imply by this that men are foolish — or 
even most men. Far from it. The barber 
and the priest, backed by the whole opinion 

66 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of the village, condemned justly the conduct 
of the ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth 
from his native place, broke the head of 
the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffen- 
sive sheep, and went through very doleful 
experiences in a certain stable. God forbid 
that an unworthy churl should escape merited 
censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather 
of the sublime cahallero. His was a very 
noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for noth- 
ing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. 
But there is more than one aspect to the 
charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. 
He, too, had his frailties. After reading so 
many romances he desired naively to escape 
with his very body from the intolerable 
reality of things. He wished to meet, eye 
to eye, the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, 
Lord of Arabia, whose armor is made of the 
skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped 
to his arm, is the gate of a fortified city. Oh 
amiable and natural weakness! Oh blessed 
simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! 
Who would not succimib to such a consoling 
temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of 
self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of 
La Mancha was not a good citizen. The 
priest and the barber were not unreasonable 

67 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

in their strictures. Without going so far as 
the old King Louis - PhiHppe, who used to 
say in his exile, "The people are never in 
fault" — one may admit that there must be 
some righteousness in the assent of a whole 
village. Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious 
meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by the 
well of an inn and knelt reverently to be 
knighted at daybreak by the fat, sly rogue 
of a landlord has come very near perfec- 
tion. He rides forth, his head encircled 
by a halo — the patron saint of all lives 
spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace 
of imagination. But he was not a good 
citizen. 

Perhaps that and nothing else was meant 
by the well-remembered exclamation of my 
tutor. 

It was in the jolly year 1873, the very 
last year in which I have had a jolly holiday. 
There have been idle years afterward, jolly 
enough in a way and not altogether without 
their lesson, but this year of which I speak 
was the year of my last school-boy holiday. 
There are other reasons why I should re- 
member that year, but they are too long to 
state formally in this place. Moreover, they 
have nothing to do with that holiday. What 

68 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

has to do with the holiday is that before 
the day on which the remark was made we 
had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, 
the Falls of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance, 
— in fact, it was a memorable holiday of 
travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly 
up the Valley of the Reuss. It was a de- 
lightful time. It was much more like a 
stroll than a tramp. Landing from a Lake of 
Lucerne steamer in Fluelen, we found our- 
selves at the end of the second day, with 
the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, 
a little way beyond Hospenthal. This is 
not the day on which the remark was made: 
in the shadows of the deep valley and with 
the habitations of men left some way behind, 
our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of 
conduct, but upon the simpler himian problem 
of shelter and food. There did not seem 
anything of the kind in sight, and we were 
thinking of turning back when suddenly, at a 
bend of the road, we came upon a building, 
ghostly in the twilight. 

At that time the work on the St. Gothard 
Tunnel was going on, and that magnificent 
enterprise of burrowing was directly respon- 
sible for the unexpected building, standing 
all alone upon the very roots of the moun- 

69 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

tains. It was long, though not big at all; 
it was low; it was built of boards, without 
ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with 
the white window-frames quite flush with 
the yellow face of its plain front. And yet 
it was a hotel; it had even a name, which I 
have forgotten. But there was no gold- 
laced doorkeeper at its humble door. A 
plain but vigorous servant-girl answered our 
inquiries, then a man and woman who owned 
the place appeared. It was clear that no 
travelers were expected, or perhaps even 
desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its 
severe style resembled the house which sur- 
mounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the 
toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of 
European childhood. However, its roof was 
not hinged and it was not full to the brim of 
slab-sided and painted animals of wood. Even 
the live tourist animal was nowhere in evi- 
dence. We had something to eat in a long, 
narrow room at one end of a long, narrow table, 
which, to my tired perception and to my sleepy 
eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see- 
saw plank, since there was no one at the other 
end to balance it against our two dusty and 
travel- stained figures. Then we hastened up- 
stairs to bed in a room smelling of pine 

70 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

planks, and I was fast asleep before my head 
touched the pillow. 

In the morning my tutor (he was a student 
of the Cracow University) woke me up early, 
and as we were dressing remarked: "There 
seems to be a lot of people staying in this 
hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up 
till eleven o'clock." This statement sur- 
prised me; I had heard no noise whatever, 
having slept like a top. 

We went down-stairs into the long and nar- 
row dining-room with its long and narrow 
table. There were two rows of plates on it. 
At one of the many curtained windows stood 
a tall, bony man with a bald head set off by 
a bunch of black hair above each ear, and 
with a long, black beard. He glanced up 
from the paper he was reading and seemed 
genuinely astonished at our intrusion. By 
and by more men came in. Not one of them 
looked like a tourist. Not a single woman 
appeared. These men seemed to know each 
other with some intimacy, but I cannot say 
they were a very talkative lot. The bald- 
headed man sat down gravely at the head of 
the table. It all had the air of a family 
party. By and by, from one of the vigor- 
ous servant-girls in national costimie, we 

71 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

discovered that the place was really a board- 
ing-house for some English engineers engaged 
at the works of the St. Gothard Tunnel; and 
I could listen my fill to the sounds of the 
English language, as far as it is used at a 
breakfast-table by men who do not believe 
in wasting many words on the mere amenities 
of life. 

This was my first contact with British man- 
kind apart from the tourist kind seen in the 
hotels of Zurich and Lucerne — the kind which 
has no real existence in a workaday world. 
I know now that the bald-headed man spoke 
with a strong Scotch accent. I have met 
many of his kind ashore and afloat. The 
second engineer of the steamer Mavis, for 
instance, ought to have been his twin brother. 
I cannot help thinking that he really was, 
though for some reason of his own he assured 
me that he never had a twin brother. Any- 
way, the deliberate, bald-headed Scot with the 
coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes 
a very romantic and mysterious person. 

We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped- 
out route led over the Furca Pass toward 
the Rhone Glacier, with the further inten- 
tion of following down the trend of the Hash 
Valley. The sim was already declining when 

72 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

we found ourselves on the top of the pass, 
and the remark alluded to was presently- 
uttered. 

We sat down by the side of the road to 
continue the argument begun half a mile or 
so before. I am certain it was an argument, 
because I remember perfectly how my tutor 
argued and how without the power of reply 
I listened, with my eyes fixed obstinately on 
the groimd. A stir on the road made me 
look up — and then I saw my unforgettable 
Englishman. There are acquaintances of 
later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I 
remember less clearly. He marched rapidly 
toward the east (attended by a hang-dog 
Swiss guide), with the mien of an ardent and 
fearless traveler. He was clad in a knicker- 
bocker suit, but as at the same time he wore 
short socks under his laced boots, for reasons 
which, whether hygienic or conscientious, 
were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed 
to the public gaze and to the tonic air of 
high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the 
splendor of their marble-like condition and 
their rich tone of young ivory. He was the 
leader of a small caravan. The light of a 
headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world 
of men and the scenery of mountains illu- 

73 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

mined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, 
silver- white whiskers, his innocently eager 
and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a 
glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly 
gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth toward the 
man and the boy sitting like dusty tramps 
by the roadside, with a modest knapsack 
lying at their feet. His white calves twinkled 
sturdily, the uncouth Swiss guide with a 
surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear 
at his elbow; a small train of three mules 
followed in single file the lead of this inspir- 
ing enthusiast. Two ladies rode past, one 
behind the other, but from the way they sat 
I saw only their calm, uniform backs, and 
the long ends of blue veils hanging behind 
far down over their identical hat-brims. His 
two daughters, surely. An industrious lug- 
gage-mule, with unstarched ears and guarded 
by a slouching, sallow driver, brought up 
the rear. My tutor, after pausing for a look 
and a faint smile, restimed his earnest argu- 
ment. 

I tell you it was a memorable year! One 
does not meet such an Englishman twice in 
a lifetime. Was he in the mystic ordering 
of common events the ambassador of my 
future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical 

74 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

moment on the top of an Alpine pass, with 
the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for mute 
and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, 
the unextinguishable and comic ardor of his 
striving-forward appearance, helped me to 
pull myself together. It must be stated 
that on that day and in the exhilarating at- 
mosphere of that elevated spot I had been 
feeling utterly crushed. It was the year in 
which I had first spoken aloud of my desire 
to go to sea. At first like those sounds that, 
ranging outside the scale to which men's ears 
are attimed, remain inaudible to our sense of 
hearing, this declaration passed unperceived. 
It was as if it had not been. Later on, by 
trying various tones, I managed to arouse 
here and there a surprised momentary atten- 
tion — ^the "What was that funny noise?" — 
sort of inquiry. Later on it was: "Did 
you hear what that boy said? What an 
extraordinary outbreak!" Presently a wave 
of scandalized astonishment (it could not 
have been greater if I had announced the 
intention of entering a Carthusian monas- 
tery) ebbing out of the educational and 
academical town of Cracow spread itself 
over several provinces. It spread itself shal- 
low but far-reaching. It stirred up a mass 

75 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of remonstrance, indignation, pitying won- 
der, bitter irony, and downright chaff. I 
could hardly breathe under its weight, and 
certainly had no words for an answer. Peo- 
ple wondered what Mr. T. B. would do now 
with his worrying nephew and, I dare say, 
hoped kindly that he would make short work 
of my nonsense. 

What he did was to come down all the 
way from Ukraine to have it out with me 
and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, im- 
partial, and just, taking his stand on the 
ground of wisdom and affection. As far as 
is possible for a boy whose power of ex- 
pression is still unformed I opened the secret 
of my thoughts to him, and he in return 
allowed me a glimpse into his mind and 
heart; the first glimpse of an inexhaustible 
and noble treasure of clear thought and warm 
feeling, which through life was to be mine 
to draw upon with a never-deceived love and 
confidence. Practically, after several exhaus- 
tive conversations, he concluded that he 
would not have me later on reproach him for 
having spoiled my life by an unconditional 
opposition. But I must take time for seri- 
ous reflection. And I must think not only 
of myself but of others; weigh the claims of 

76 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

affection and conscience against my own sin- 
cerity of purpose. "Think well what it all 
means in the larger issues — my boy," he ex- 
horted me, finally, with special friendliness. 
"And meantime try to get the best place 
you can at the yearly examinations." 

The scholastic year came to an end. I 
took a fairly good place at the exams, which 
for me (for certain reasons) happened to be 
a more difficult task than for other boys. 
In that respect I could enter with a good 
conscience upon that holiday which was like 
a long visit pour prendre conge of the main- 
land of old Europe I was to see so little 
of for the next four- and- twenty years. Such, 
however, was not the avowed purpose of that 
tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in 
order to distract and occupy my thoughts in 
other directions. Nothing had been said for 
months of my going to sea. But my attach- 
ment to my young tutor and his influence 
over me were so well known that he must 
have received a confidential mission to talk 
me out of my romantic folly. It was an 
excellently appropriate arrangement, as nei- 
ther he nor I had ever had a single glimpse 
of the sea in our lives. That was to come 
by and by for both of us in Venice, from the 

6 77 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had 
taken his mission to heart so well that I 
began to feel crushed before we reached 
Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake 
steamboats, he had argued away for me the 
obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! 
Of his devotion to his unworthy pupil there 
can be no doubt. He had proved it already by 
two years of unremitting and arduous care. 
I could not hate him. But he had been 
crushing me slowly, and when he started to 
argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was 
perhaps nearer a success than either he or 
I imagined. I listened to him in despairing 
silence, feeling that ghostly, unrealized, and 
desired sea of my dreams escape from the 
unnerved grip of my will. 

The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed 
— and the argument went on. What reward 
could I expect from such a life at the end of my 
years, either in ambition, honor, or conscience? 
An unanswerable question. But I felt no longer 
crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine 
emotion was visible in his as well as in mine. 
The end came all at once. He picked up the 
knapsack suddenly and got onto his feet. 

"You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don 
Quixote. That's what you are." 

78 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I was surprised. I was only fifteen and 
did not know what he meant exactly. But 
I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the 
immortal knight turning up in connection 
with my own folly, as some people would 
call it to my face. Alas! I don't think 
there was anything to be proud of. Mine 
was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn 
damsels, the redressers of this world's wrong 
are made of; and my tutor was the man 
to know that best. Therein, in his indigna- 
tion, he was superior to the barber and the 
priest when he flung at me an honored name 
like a reproach. 

I walked behind him for full five minutes; 
then without looking back he stopped. The 
shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over 
the Furca Pass. When I came up to him he 
turned to me and in full view of the Finster-Aar- 
horn, with his band of giant brothers rearing 
their monstrous heads against a brilliant sky, 
put his hand on my shoulder affectionately. 

"Well! That's enough. We will have no 
more of it." 

And indeed there was no more question 
of my mysterious vocation between us. There 
was to be no more question of it at all, no- 
where or with any one. We began the 

79 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. 
Eleven years later, month for month, I stood 
on Tower Hill on the steps of the St. Kath- 
erine's Dockhouse, a master in the British 
Merchant Service. But the man who put 
his hand on my shoulder at the top of the 
Furca Pass was no longer living. 

That very year of our travels he took his 
degree of the Philosophical Faculty — and 
only then his true vocation declared itself. 
Obedient to the call, he entered at once upon 
the four-year course of the Medical Schools. 
A day came when, on the deck of a ship 
moored in Calcutta, I opened a letter telling 
me of the end of an enviable existence. He 
had made for himself a practice in some 
obscure little town of Austrian Galicia. And 
the letter went on to tell me how all the 
bereaved poor of the district, Christians and 
Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's 
coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very 
gate of the cemetery. 

How short his years and how clear his 
vision! What greater reward in ambition, 
honor, and conscience could he have hoped 
to win for himself when, on the top of the 
Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the 
end of my opening life? 



Ill 



The devouring in a dismal forest of a 
luckless Lithuanian dog by my granduncle 
Nicholas B. in company of two other mili- 
tary and famished scarecrows, symbolized, 
to my childish imagination, the whole horror 
of the retreat from Moscow, and the im- 
morality of a conqueror's ambition. An ex- 
treme distaste for that objectionable episode 
has tinged the views I hold as to the char- 
acter and achievements of Napoleon the 
Great. I need not say that these are un- 
favorable. It was morally reprehensible for 
that great captain to induce a simple-minded 
Polish gentleman to eat dog by raising in 
his breast a false hope of national indepen- 
dence. It has been the fate of that credulous 
nation to starve for upward of a hundred 
years on a diet of false hopes and — well — 
dog. It is, when one thinks of it, a sin- 
gularly poisonous regimen. Some pride in the 
national constitution which has survived a 
long course of such dishes is really excusable. 

8i 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

But enough of generalizing. Returning to 
particulars, Mr. Nicholas B. confided to his 
sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his mis- 
anthropically laconic manner that this supper 
in the woods had been nearly "the death of 
him." This is not surprising. What sur- 
prises me is that the story was ever heard 
of; for granduncle Nicholas differed in this 
from the generality of military men of Na- 
poleon's time (and perhaps of all time) that 
he did not like to talk of his campaigns, 
which began at Friedland and ended some- 
where in the neighborhood of Bar-le-Duc. 
His admiration of the great Emperor was 
unreserved in everything but expression. Like 
the religion of earnest men, it was too pro- 
found a sentiment to be displayed before 
a world of little faith. Apart from that he 
seemed as completely devoid of military anec- 
dotes as though he had hardly ever seen a 
soldier in his life. Proud of his decorations 
earned before he was twenty-five, he refused 
to wear the ribbons at the buttonhole in the 
manner practised to this day in Europe and 
even was unwilling to display the insignia 
on festive occasions, as though he wished to 
conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful. 
"It is enough that I have them," he used to 

82 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

mutter. In the course of thirty years they 
were seen on his breast only twice — at an 
auspicious marriage in the family and at the 
funeral of an old friend. That the wedding 
which was thus honored was not the wedding 
of my mother I learned only late in life, too 
late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas 
B., who made amends at my birth by a long 
letter of congratulation containing the follow- 
ing prophecy: "He will see better times." 
Even in his embittered heart there lived a 
hope. But he was not a true prophet. 

He was a man of strange contradictions. 
Living for many years in his brother's house, 
the home of many children, a house full of 
life, of animation, noisy with a constant 
coming and going of many guests, he kept 
his habits of solitude and silence. Consid- 
ered as obstinately secretive in all his pur- 
poses, he was in reality the victim of a most 
painful irresolution in all matters of civil life. 
Under his taciturn, phlegmatic behavior was 
hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate 
anger. I suspect he had no talent for narra- 
tive; but it seemed to afford him somber 
satisfaction to declare that he was the last 
man to ride over the bridge of the river 
Elster after the battle of Leipsic. Lest some 

83 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

construction favorable to his valor should be 
put on the fact he condescended to explain 
how it came to pass. It seems that shortly 
after the retreat began he was sent back to 
the town where some divisions of the French 
army (and among them the Polish corps of 
Prince Joseph Poniatowski) , jammed hope- 
lessly in the streets, were being simply ex- 
terminated by the troops of the Allied Powers. 
When asked what it was like in there, Mr. 
Nicholas B. muttered only the word "Sham- 
bles." Having delivered his message to the 
Prince he hastened away at once to render an 
account of his mission to the superior who had 
sent him. By that time the advance of the 
enemy had enveloped the town, and he was 
shot at from houses and chased all the way 
to the river-bank by a disorderly mob of 
Austrian Dragoons and Prussian Hussars. 
The bridge had been mined early in the morn- 
ing, and his opinion was that the sight of the 
horsemen converging from many sides in 
the pursuit of his person alarmed the officer 
in command of the sappers and caused the 
premature firing of the charges. He had not 
gone more than two hundred yards on the 
other side when he heard the sound of the 
fatal explosions. Mr. Nicholas B. concluded 

84 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

his bald narrative with the word "Imbecile," 
uttered with the utmost deliberation. It 
testified to his indignation at the loss of so 
many thousands of lives. But his phlegmatic 
physiognomy lighted up when he spoke of 
his only woimd, with something resembling 
satisfaction. You will see that there was 
some reason for it when you learn that he 
was wounded in the heel. "Like his Majesty 
the Emperor Napoleon himself," he reminded 
his hearers, with assumed indifference. There 
can be no doubt that the indifference was 
assumed, if one thinks what a very distin- 
guished sort of wound it was. In all the 
history of warfare there are, I believe, only 
three warriors publicly known to have been 
wounded in the heel — Achilles and Napoleon 
— demigods indeed — to whom the familial 
piety of an unworthy descendant adds the 
name of the simple mortal, Nicholas B. 

The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. 
staying with a distant relative of ours, owner 
of a small estate in Galicia. How he got 
there across the breadth of an armed Europe, 
and after what adventures, I am afraid will 
never be known now. All his papers were 
destroyed shortly before his death; but if 
there was among them, as he affirmed, a 

8s 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

concise record of his life, then I am pretty 
sure it did not take up more than a half- 
sheet of foolscap or so. This relative of ours 
happened to be an Austrian officer who had 
left the service after the battle of Austerlitz. 
Unlike Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his 
decorations, he liked to display his honorable 
discharge in which he was mentioned as un- 
schreckbar (fearless) before the enemy. No 
conjunction could seem more unpromising, 
yet it stands in the family tradition that 
these two got on very well together in their 
rural solitude. 

When asked whether he had not been sore- 
ly tempted during the Hundred Days to 
make his way again to France and join the 
service of his beloved Emperor, Mr. Nicholas 
B. used to mutter: "No money. No horse. 
Too far to walk." 

The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of 
national hopes affected adversely the char- 
acter of Mr. Nicholas B. He shrank from 
returning to his province. But for that 
there was also another reason. Mr. Nicholas 
B. and his brother — my maternal grand- 
father — ^had lost their father early, while 
they were quite children. Their mother, 
young still and left very well off, married 

86 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

again a man of great charm and of an amiable 
disposition, but without a penny. He turned 
out an affectionate and careful stepfather; 
it was unfortunate, though, that while direct- 
ing the boys' education and forming their 
character by wise counsel, he did his best 
to get hold of the fortune by buying and sell- 
ing land in his own name and investing capital 
in such a manner as to cover up the traces 
of the real ownership. It seems that such 
practices can be successful if one is charming 
enough to dazzle one's own wife permanently, 
and brave enough to defy the vain terrors of 
public opinion. The critical time came when 
the elder of the boys on attaining his ma- 
jority, in the year i8i i, asked for the accounts 
and some part at least of the inheritance to 
begin life upon. It was then that the step- 
father declared with calm finality that there 
were no accounts to render and no property 
to inherit. The whole fortune was his very 
own. He was very good-natured about the 
young man's misapprehension of the true 
state of affairs, but, of course, felt obliged 
to maintain his position firmly. Old friends 
came and went busily, voluntary mediators 
appeared traveling on most horrible roads 
from the most distant comers of the three 

87 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

provinces; and the Marshal of the Nobihty 
(ex-officio guardian of all well-bom orphans) 
called a meeting of landowners to "ascer- 
tain in a friendly way how the misunder- 
standing between X and his stepsons had 
arisen and devise proper measures to remove 
the same." A deputation to that effect 
visited X, who treated them to excellent 
wines, but absolutely refused his ear to their 
remonstrances. As to the proposals for ar- 
bitration he simply laughed at them; yet 
the whole province must have been aware 
that fourteen years before, when he married 
the widow, all his visible fortune consisted 
(apart from his social qualities) in a smart 
four-horse turnout with two servants, with 
whom he went about visiting from house to 
house; and as to any funds he might have 
possessed at that time their existence could 
only be inferred from the fact that he was 
very punctual in settling his modest losses 
at cards. But by the magic power of stub- 
bom and constant assertion, there were 
found presently, here and there, people who 
mumbled that surely "there must be some- 
thing in it." However, on his next name-day 
(which he used to celebrate by a great three 
days' shooting party), of all the invited 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

crowd only two guests turned up, distant 
neighbors of no importance; one notori- 
ously a fool, and the other a very pious and 
honest person, but such a passionate lover 
of the gun that on his own confession he 
could not have refused an invitation to a 
shooting party from the devil himself. X 
met this manifestation of public opinion with 
the serenity of an unstained conscience. He 
refused to be crushed. Yet he must have 
been a man of deep feeling, because, when 
his wife took openly the part of her children, 
he lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed 
himself heartbroken, and drove her out of 
the house, neglecting in his grief to give her 
enough time to pack her trunks. 

This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an 
abominable marvel of chicane, which by the 
use of every legal subterfuge was made to 
last for many years. It was also the occasion 
for a display of much kindness and sympathy. 
All the neighboring houses flew open for the 
reception of the homeless. Neither legal aid 
nor material assistance in the prosecution 
of the suit was ever wanting. X, on his 
side, went about shedding tears publicly 
over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his 
wife's blind infatuation; but as at the same 

89 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

time he displayed great cleverness in the art 
of concealing material documents (he was 
even suspected of having burned a lot of his- 
torically interesting family papers) this scan- 
dalous litigation had to be ended by a com- 
promise lest worse should befall. It was 
settled finally by a surrender, out of the dis- 
puted estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, 
of two villages with the names of which I 
do not intend to trouble my readers. After 
this lame and impotent conclusion neither 
the wife nor the stepsons had anything to 
say to the man who had presented the world 
with such a successful example of self-help 
based on character, determination, and in- 
dustry; and my great-grandmother, her 
health completely broken down, died a couple 
of years later in Carlsbad. Legally secured 
by a decree in the possession of his plunder, 
X regained his wonted serenity, and went on 
living in the neighborhood in a comfortable 
style and in apparent peace of mind. His 
big shoots were fairly well attended again. 
He was never tired of assuring people that 
he bore no grudge for what was past; he 
protested loudly of his constant affection for 
his wife and stepchildren. It was true, he 
said, that they had tried to strip him as 

90 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

naked as a Turkish saint in the decHne of 
his days; and because he had defended him- 
self from spoHation, as anybody else in his 
place would have done, they had abandoned 
him now to the horrors of a solitary old age. 
Nevertheless, his love for them survived 
these cruel blows. And there might have 
been some truth in his protestations. Very 
soon he began to make overtures of friend- 
ship to his eldest stepson, my maternal 
grandfather; and when these were peremp- 
torily rejected he went on renewing them 
again and again with characteristic obstinacy. 
For years he persisted in his efforts at recon- 
ciliation, promising my grandfather to exe- 
cute a will in his favor if he only would be 
friends again to the extent of calling now and 
then (it was fairly close neighborhood for 
these parts, forty miles or so), or even of 
putting in an appearance for the great shoot 
on the name-day. My grandfather was an 
ardent lover of every sport. His tempera- 
ment was as free from hardness and ani- 
mosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the 
liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the 
only public school of some standing then in 
the south, he had also read deeply the authors 
of the eighteenth century. In him Christian 

91 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

charity was joined to a philosophical in- 
dulgence for the failings of human nature. 
But the memory of those miserably anxious 
early years, his young man's years robbed of 
all generous illusions by the cynicism of the 
sordid lawsuit, stood in the way of forgive- 
ness. He never succumbed to the fascina- 
tion of the great shoot; and X, his heart set 
to the last on reconciliation, with the draft 
of the will ready for signature kept by his 
bedside, died intestate. The fortune thus 
acquired and augmented by a wise and care- 
ful management passed to some distant 
relatives whom he had never seen and who 
even did not bear his name. 

Meantime the blessing of general peace 
descended upon Europe. Mr. Nicholas B., 
bidding good-by to his hospitable relative, 
the "fearless" Austrian officer, departed from 
Galicia, and without going near his native 
place, where the odious lawsuit was still 
going on, proceeded straight to Warsaw and 
entered the army of the newly constituted 
Polish kingdom under the scepter of Alex- 
ander I., Autocrat of all the Russias. 

This kingdom, created by the Vienna 
Congress as an acknowledgment to a nation 
of its former independent existence, included 

92 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

only the central provinces of the old Polish 
patrimony. A brother of the Emperor, the 
Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its 
Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, married 
morganatically to a Polish lady to whom 
he was fiercely attached, extended this affec- 
tion to what he called "My Poles" in a 
capricious and savage manner. Sallow in 
complexion, with a Tartar physiognomy and 
fierce little eyes, he walked with his fists 
clenched, his body bent forward, darting 
suspicious glances from under an enormous 
cocked hat. His intelligence was limited, 
and his sanity itself was doubtful. The 
hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, 
not by mystic leanings as in his two brothers, 
Alexander and Nicholas (in their various 
ways, for one was mystically liberal and the 
other mystically autocratic), but by the fury 
of an imcontroUable temper which generally 
broke out in disgusting abuse on the parade- 
ground. He was a passionate militarist and 
an amazing drill-master. He treated his Pol- 
ish army as a spoiled child treats a favorite 
toy, except that he did not take it to bed 
with him at night. It was not small enough 
for that. But he played with it all day 
and every day, delighting in the variety of 
7 93 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

pretty uniforms and in the fun of incessant 
drilling. This childish passion, not for war, 
but for mere militarism, achieved a desirable 
result. The Polish army, in its equipment, 
in its armament, and in its battle-field effi- 
ciency, as then imderstood, became, by the 
end of the year 1830, a first-rate tactical 
instnmient. Polish peasantry (not serfs) 
served in the ranks by enlistment, and the 
officers belonged mainly to the smaller nobil- 
ity. Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic 
record, had no difficulty in obtaining a lieu- 
tenancy, but the promotion in the Polish 
army was slow, because, being a separate 
organization, it took no part in the wars of 
the Russian Empire against either Persia or 
Turkey. Its first campaign, against Russia 
itself, was to be its last. In 1831, on the out- 
break of the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas B. 
was the senior captain of his regiment. Some 
time before he had been made head of the 
remount establishment quartered outside the 
kingdom in our southern provinces, whence 
almost all the horses for the Polish cavalry 
were drawn. For the first time since he went 
away from home at the age of eighteen to 
begin his military life by the battle of Fried- 
land, Mr. Nicholas B. breathed the air of 

94 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the "Border," his native air. Unkind fate 
was lying in wait for him among the scenes 
of his youth. At the first news of the rising 
in Warsaw all the remount establishment, 
officers, "vets.," and the very troopers, were 
put promptly under arrest and hurried off 
in a body beyond the Dnieper to the nearest 
town in Russia proper. From there they 
were dispersed to the distant parts of the 
empire. On this occasion poor Mr. Nicholas 
B. penetrated into Russia much farther than 
he ever did in the times of Napoleonic in- 
vasion, if much less willingly. Astrakan was 
his destination. He remained there three 
years, allowed to live at large in the town, 
but having to report himself every day at 
noon to the military commandant, who used 
to detain him frequently for a pipe and a 
chat. It is difficult to form a just idea of 
what a chat with Mr. Nicholas B. could 
have been like. There must have been much 
compressed rage under his taciturnity, for 
the commandant communicated to him the 
news from the theater of war, and this news 
was such as it could be — that is, very bad for 
the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B. received these 
communications with outward phlegm, but 
the Russian showed a warm sympathy for 

95 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

his prisoner. "As a soldier myself I under- 
stand your feelings. You, of course, woiild 
like to be in the thick of it. By heavens! 
I am fond of you. If it were not for the terms 
of the military oath I would let you go on 
my own responsibility. What difference could 
it make to us, one more or less of you?" 

At other times he wondered with sim- 
plicity. 

"Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch " (my 
great-grandfather's name was Stephen, and 
the commandant used the Russian form of 
polite address) — "tell me why is it that you 
Poles are always looking for trouble? What 
else could you expect from running up 
against Russia?" 

He was capable, too, of philosophical re- 
flections. 

"Look at your Napoleon now. A great 
man. There is no denying it that he was a 
great man as long as he was content to 
thrash those Germans and Austrians and all 
those nations. But no! He must go to 
Russia looking for trouble, and what's the 
consequence? Such as you see me; I have 
rattled this saber of mine on the pavements 
of Paris." 

After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. 
96 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

described him as a "worthy man but stupid," 
whenever he could be induced to speak of 
the conditions of his exile. Declining the 
option offered him to enter the Russian army, 
he was retired with only half the pension of 
his rank. His nephew (my uncle and guar- 
dian) told me that the first lasting impression 
on his memory as a child of four was the glad 
excitement reigning in his parents' house on 
the day when Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home 
from his detention in Russia. 

Every generation has its memories. The 
first memories of Mr. Nicholas B. might 
have been shaped by the events of the last 
partition of Poland, and he lived long enough 
to suffer from the last armed rising in 1863, 
an event which affected the future of all my 
generation and has colored my earliest im- 
pressions. His brother, in whose house he 
had sheltered for some seventeen years his 
misanthropical timidity before the common- 
^ est problems of life, having died in the early 
fifties, Mr. Nicholas B. had to screw his cour- 
age up to the sticking-point and come to 
some decision as to the future. After a 
long and agonizing hesitation he was per- 
suaded at last to become the tenant of some 
fifteen hundred acres out of the estate of a 

97 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

friend in the neighborhood. The terms of 
the lease were very advantageous, but the 
retired situation of the village and a plain, 
comfortable house in good repair were, I 
fancy, the greatest inducements. He lived 
there quietly for about ten years, seeing very 
few people and taking no part in the public 
life of the province, such as it could be under 
an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His char- 
acter and his patriotism were above suspicion ; 
but the organizers of the rising in their fre- 
quent journeys up and down the province 
scrupulously avoided coming near his house. 
It was generally felt that the repose of the 
old man's last years ought not to be dis- 
turbed. Even such intimates as my paternal 
grandfather, comrade-in-arms during Napo- 
leon's Moscow campaign, and later on a 
fellow officer in the Polish army, refrained 
from visiting his crony as the date of the 
outbreak approached. My paternal grand- 
father's two sons and his only daughter were 
all deeply involved in the revolutionary work ; 
he himself was of that type of Polish squire 
whose only ideal of patriotic action was to 
"get into the saddle and drive them out." 
But even he agreed that "dear Nicholas 
must not be worried." All this considerate 

98 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

caution on the part of friends, both con- 
spirators and others, did not prevent Mr. 
Nicholas B. being made to feel the mis- 
fortunes of that ill-omened year. 

Less than forty-eight hours after the be- 
ginning of the rebellion in that part of the 
country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks 
passed through the village and invaded the 
homestead. Most of them remained, formed 
between the house and the stables, while 
several, dismounting, ransacked the various 
outbuildings. The officer in command, ac- 
companied by two men, walked up to the 
front door. All the blinds on that side were 
down. The officer told the servant who 
received him that he wanted to see his 
master. He was answered that the master 
was away from home, which was perfectly 
true. 

I follow here the tale as told afterward 
by the servant to my granduncle's friends 
and relatives, and as I have heard it re- 
peated. 

On receiving this answer the Cossack offi- 
cer, who had been standing in the porch, 
stepped into the house. 

"Where is the master gone, then?" 

"Our master went to J " (the govem- 

99 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ment town some fifty miles off) "the day 
before yesterday." 

"There are only two horses in the stables. 
Where are the others?" 

"Our master always travels with his own 
horses" (meaning: not by post). "He will 
be away a week or more. He was pleased 
to mention to me that he had to attend to 
some business in the Civil Court." 

While the servant was speaking the officer 
looked about the hall. There was a door 
facing him, a door to the right, and a door 
to the left. The officer chose to enter the 
room on the left, and ordered the blinds to 
be pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s 
study, with a couple of tall bookcases, some 
pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides 
the big center- table, with books and papers, 
there was a quite small writing-table, with 
several drawers, standing between the door 
and the window in a good light; and at 
this table my granduncle usually sat either 
to read or write. 

On pulling up the blind the servant was 
startled by the discovery that the whole male 
population of the village was massed in front, 
trampling down the flower-beds. There were 
also a few women among them. He was 

lOO 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

glad to observe the village priest (of the 
Orthodox Church) coming up the drive. The 
good man in his haste had tucked up his 
cassock as high as the top of his boots. 

The officer had been looking at the backs 
of the books in the bookcases. Then he 
perched himself on the edge of the center- 
table and remarked easily: 

"Your master did not take you to town 
with him, then?" 

"I am the head servant, and he leaves me 
in charge of the house. It's a strong, young 
chap that travels with our master. If — God 
forbid — there was some accident on the road, 
he would be of much more use than I." 

Glancing through the window, he saw the 
priest arguing vehemently in the thick of 
the crowd, which seemed subdued by his 
interference. Three or four men, however, 
were talking with the Cossacks at the door. 

"And you don't think your master has 
gone to join the rebels maybe — eh?" asked 
the officer. 

"Our master would be too old for that, 
surely. He's well over seventy, and he's 
getting feeble, too. It's some years now 
since he's been on horseback, and he can't 
walk much, either, now." 

lOI 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

The officer sat there swinging his leg, very 
quiet and indifferent. By that time the 
peasants who had been talking with the 
Cossack troopers at the door had been per- 
mitted to get into the hall. One or two more 
left the crowd and followed them in. They 
were seven in all, and among them the black- 
smith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed 
deferentially to the officer. 

"Won't your honor be pleased to tell the 
people to go back to their homes? What do 
they want to push themselves into the house 
like this for? It's not proper for them to 
behave like this while our master's away 
and I am responsible for ever3rthing here." 
The officer only laughed a little, and after 
a while inquired: 

"Have you any arms in the house?" 
"Yes. We have. Some old things." 
"Bring them all here, onto this table." 
The servant made another attempt to 
obtain protection. 

"Won't your honor tell these chaps. . .?" 
But the officer looked at him in silence, 
in such a way that he gave it up at once 
and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to 
help him collect the arms. Meantime the 
officer walked slowly through all the rooms 

I02 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

in the house, examining them attentively 
but touching nothing. The peasants in the 
hall fell back and took off their caps when 
he passed through. He said nothing what- 
ever to them. When he came back to the 
study all the arms to be found in the house 
were lying on the table. There was a pair 
of big, flint-lock holster pistols from Napo- 
leonic times, two cavalry swords, one of the 
French, the other of the Polish army pattern, 
with a fowling-piece or two. 

The officer, opening the window, flung 
out pistols, swords, and guns, one after an- 
other, and his troopers ran to pick them up. 
The peasants in the hall, encouraged by his 
manner, had stolen after him into the study. 
He gave not the slightest sign of being con- 
scious of their existence, and, his business 
being apparently concluded, strode out of 
the house without a word. Directly he left, 
the peasants in the study put on their caps 
and began to smile at each other. 

The Cossacks rode away, passing through 
the yards of the home farm straight into 
the fields. The priest, still arguing with the 
peasants, moved gradually down the drive 
and his earnest eloquence was drawing the 
silent mob after him, away from the house. 

103 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

This justice must be rendered to the parish 
priests of the Greek Church that, strangers 
to the country as they were (being all drawn 
from the interior of Russia), the majority 
of them used such influence as they had over 
their flocks in the cause of peace and hu- 
manity. True to the spirit of their calling, 
they tried to soothe the passions of the ex- 
cited peasantry, and opposed rapine and 
violence, whenever they could, with all their 
might. And this conduct they pursued against 
the express wishes of the authorities. Later 
on some of them were made to suffer for this 
disobedience by being removed abruptly to 
the far north or sent away to Siberian 
parishes. 

The servant was anxious to get rid of 
the few peasants who had got into the house. 
What sort of conduct was that, he asked 
them, toward a man who was only a tenant, 
had been invariably good and considerate 
to the villagers for years, and only the other 
day had agreed to give up two meadows for 
the use of the village herd? He reminded 
them, too, of Mr. Nicholas B.'s devotion to 
the sick in time of cholera. Every word of 
this was true, and so far effective that the 
fellows began to scratch their heads and look 

104 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the 
window, exclaiming; "Look! there's all 
your crowd going away quietly, and you silly 
chaps had better go after them and pray 
God to forgive you your evil thoughts." 

This appeal was an unlucky inspiration. 
In crowding clumsily to the window to see 
whether he was speaking the truth, the fel- 
lows overturned the little writing-table. As 
it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard. 
"There's money in that thing," cried the 
blacksmith. In a moment the top of the 
delicate piece of furniture was smashed and 
there lay exposed in a drawer eighty half- 
imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight in 
Russia even at that time; it put the peas- 
ants beside themselves. "There must be 
more of that in the house, and we shall have 
it," yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith. "This 
is war-time." The others were already 
shouting out of the window, urging the crowd 
to come back and help. The priest, aban- 
doned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms 
up and hvirried away so as not to see what 
was going to happen. 

In their search for money that bucolic mob 
smashed everythng in t e ho se, ripping 
with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

as the servant said, there were no two pieces 
of wood holding together left in the whole 
house. They broke some very fine mirrors, 
all the windows, and every piece of glass 
and china. They threw the books and pa- 
pers out on the lawn and set fire to the heap 
for the mere fun of the thing, apparently. 
Absolutely the only one solitary thing which 
they left whole was a small ivory crucifix, 
which remained hanging on the wall in the 
wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags, 
broken mahogany, and splintered boards 
which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead. 
Detecting the servant in the act of stealing 
away with a japanned tin box, they tore it 
from him, and because he resisted they threw 
him out of the dining-room window. The 
house was on one floor, but raised well above 
the ground, and the fall was so serious that 
the man remained lying stunned till the cook 
and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk 
from their hiding-places and picked him up. 
But by that time the mob had departed, 
carrying off the tin box, which they sup- 
posed to be full of paper money. Some 
distance from the house, in the middle of a 
field, they broke it open. They found in- 
side documents engrossed on parchment and 

io6 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the two crosses of the Legion of Honor and 
For Valor. At the sight of these objects, 
which, the blacksmith explained, were marks 
of honor given only by the Tsar, they became 
extremely frightened at what they had done. 
They threw the whole lot away into a ditch 
and dispersed hastily. 

On learning of this particular loss Mr. 
Nicholas B. broke down completely. The 
mere sacking of his house did not seem to 
affect him much. While he was still in bed 
from the shock, the two crosses were foimd 
and returned to him. It helped somewhat 
his slow convalescence, but the tin box and 
the parchments, though searched for in all 
the ditches around, never tirnied up again. 
He could not get over the loss of his Legion 
of Honor Patent, whose preamble, setting 
forth his services, he knew by heart to the 
very letter, and after this blow volunteered 
sometimes to recite, tears standing in his 
eyes the while. Its terms haunted him ap- 
parently during the last two years of his 
life to such an extent that he used to repeat 
them to himself. This is confirmed by the 
remark made more than once by his old 
servant to the more intimate friends. "What 
makes my heart heavy is to hear our master 

107 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

in his room at night walking up and down 
and praying aloud in the French language." 
It must have been somewhat over a year 
afterward that I saw Mr. Nicholas B. — or, 
more correctly, that he saw me — ^for the last 
time. It was, as I have already said, at the 
time when my mother had a three months' 
leave from exile, which she was spending in 
the house of her brother, and friends and re- 
lations were coming from far and near to 
do her honor. It is inconceivable that Mr. 
Nicholas B. should not have been of the num- 
ber. The little child a few months old he 
had taken up in his arms on the day of his 
home-coming, after years of war and exile, 
was confessing her faith in national salva- 
tion by suffering exile in her turn. I do not 
know whether he was present on the very 
day of our departure. I have already ad- 
mitted that for me he is more especially the 
man who in his youth had eaten roast dog 
in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow- 
loaded pines. My memory cannot place him 
in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, 
some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanes- 
cent impression of a meager, slight, rigid 
figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, 
is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas 

1 08 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the 
memory of his grandnephew, the last siu"- 
viving human being, I suppose, of all those 
he had seen in the course of his taciturn life. 
But I remember well the day of our de- 
parture back to exile. The elongated, bi- 
zarre, shabby traveling - carriage with four 
post-horses, standing before the long front 
of the house with its eight columns, four on 
each side of the broad flight of stairs. On 
the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, 
one or two friends from the nearest neigh- 
borhood, a perfect silence; on all the faces 
an air of sober concentration; my grand- 
mother, all in black, gazing stoically; my uncle 
giving his arm to my mother down to the 
carriage in which I had been placed already; 
at the top of the flight my little cousin in a 
short skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal 
of red in it, and like a small princess attended 
by the women of her own household; the 
head gouvernante, our dear, corpulent Fran- 
cesca (who had been for thirty years in the 
service of the B. family), the former nurse, 
now outdoor attendant, a handsome peasant 
face wearing a compassionate expression, 
and the good, ugly Mile. Durand, the gov- 
erness, with her black eyebrows meeting over 
8 109 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

a short, thick nose, and a complexion like 
pale-brown paper. Of all the eyes turned to- 
ward the carriage, her good-natured eyes 
only were dropping tears, and it was her 
sobbing voice alone that broke the silence 
with an appeal to me: "N'oiiblie pas ton 
francais, mon cheri.'' In three months, sim- 
ply by playing with us, she had taught me 
not only to speak French, but to read it as 
well. She was indeed an excellent playmate. 
In the distance, half-way down to the great 
gates, a light, open trap, harnessed with three 
horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn up on 
one side, with the police captain of the dis- 
trict sitting in it, the vizor of his flat cap 
with a red band pulled down over his eyes. 

It seems strange that he should have been 
there to watch our going so carefully. With- 
out wishing to treat with levity the just 
timidities of Imperialists all the world over, 
I may allow myself the reflection that a 
woman, practically condemned by the doctors, 
and a small boy not quite six years old, could 
not be regarded as seriously dangerous, even for 
the largest of conceivable empires saddled 
with the most sacred of responsibilities. And 
this good man I believe did not think so, either. 

I learned afterward why he was present 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

on that day. I don't remember any outward 
signs; but it seems that, about a month before, 
my mother became so unwell that there was 
a doubt whether she could be made fit to 
travel in the time. In this uncertainty the 
Governor-General in Kiev was petitioned to 
grant her a fortnight's extension of stay in her 
brother's house. No answer whatever was 
returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk 
the police captain of the district drove up to 
the house and told my uncle's valet, who 
ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak 
with the master in private, at once. Very 
much impressed (he thought it was going to 
be an arrest), the servant, "more dead than 
alive with fright," as he related afterward, 
smuggled him through the big drawing-room, 
which was dark (that room was not lighted 
every evening), on tiptoe, so as not to attract 
the attention of the ladies in the house, and 
led him by way of the orangery to my uncle's 
private apartments. 

The policeman, without any preliminaries, 
thrust a paper into my uncle's hands. 

"There. Pray read this. I have no busi- 
ness to show this paper to you. It is wrong 
of me. But I can't either eat or sleep with 
such a job hanging over me." 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

That police captain, a native of Great 
Russia, had been for many years serving in 
the district. 

My uncle unfolded and read the document. 
It was a service order issued from the Gov- 
ernor-General's secretariat, dealing with the 
matter of the petition and directing the 
police captain to disregard all remonstrances 
and explanations in regard to that illness 
either from medical men or others, "and if 
she has not left her brother's house" — it 
went on to say — "on the morning of the day 
specified on her permit, you are to despatch 
her at once under escort, direct" (underlined) 
"to the prison-hospital in Kiev, where she 
will be treated as her case demands." 

"For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your 
sister goes away punctually on that day. 
Don't give me this work to do with a woman 
— and with one of your family, too. I simply 
cannot bear to think of it." 

He was absolutely wringing his hands. 
My uncle looked at him in silence. 

"Thank you for this warning. I assure 
you that even if she were dying she would 
be carried out to the carriage." 

"Yes — indeed — and what difference would 
it make — travel to Kiev or back to her hus- 

112 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

band? For she would have to go — death or 
no death. And mind, Mr. B., I will be here 
on the day, not that I doubt your promise, 
but because I must. I have got to. Duty. 
All the same my trade is not fit for a dog 
since some of you Poles will persist in re- 
belling, and all of you have got to suffer for 
it." 

This is the reason why he was there in an 
open three-horse trap pulled up between the 
house and the great gates. I regret not being 
able to give up his name to the scorn of all 
believers in the rights of conquest, as a repre- 
hensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial great- 
ness. On the other hand, I am in a position 
to state the name of the Governor - General 
who signed the order with the marginal note 
"to be carried out to the letter" in his own 
handwriting. The gentleman's name was Be- 
zak. A high dignitary, an energetic official, 
the idol for a time of the Russian patriotic 
press. 

Each generation has its memories. 



IV 



It must not be supposed that, in setting 
forth the memories of this half -hour between 
the moment my uncle left my room till we 
met again at dinner, I am losing sight of 
Almayer's Folly. Having confessed that my 
first novel was begun in idleness — a holiday 
task — I think I have also given the impres- 
sion that it was a much-delayed book. It 
was never dismissed from my mind, even 
when the hope of ever finishing it was very 
faint. Many things came in its way: daily 
duties, new impressions, old memories. It 
was not the outcome of a need — the famous 
need of self-expression which artists find in 
their search for motives. The necessity which 
impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, 
a completely masked and unaccountable phe- 
nomenon. Or perhaps some idle and frivolous 
magician (there must be magicians in London) 
had cast a spell over me through his parlor 
window as I explored the maze of streets east 
and west in solitary leisurely walks without 

114 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

chart and compass. Till I began to write 
that novel I had written nothing but letters, 
and not very many of these. I never made 
a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an 
anecdote in my life. The conception of a 
planned book was entirely outside my mental 
range when I sat down to write; the am- 
bition of being an author had never turned 
up among those gracious imaginary exist- 
ences one creates fondly for oneself at times in 
the stillness and immobility of a day-dream: 
yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that 
from the moment I had done blackening 
over the first manuscript page of Almayer's 
Folly (it contained about two hundred words 
and this proportion of words to a page has 
remained with me through the fifteen years 
of my writing life), from the moment I had, in 
the simplicity of my heart and the amazing 
ignorance of my mind, written that page the 
die was cast. Never had Rubicon been more 
blindly forded without invocation to the 
gods, without fear of men. 

That morning I got up from my breakfast, 
pushing the chair back, and rang the bell 
violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely, 
or perhaps I should say eagerly — I do not 
know. But manifestly it must have been 

IIS 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

a special ring of the bell, a common sound 
made impressive, like the ringing of a bell 
for the raising of the curtain upon a new 
scene. It was an unusual thing for me to 
do. Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast 
and I seldom took the trouble to ring the 
bell for the table to be cleared away; but 
on that morning, for some reason hidden in 
the general mysteriousness of the event, I 
did not dawdle. And yet I was not in a htirry. 
I pulled the cord casually, and while the faint 
tinkling somewhere down in the basement 
went on, I charged my pipe in the usual way 
and I looked for the match-box with glances 
distraught indeed, but exhibiting, I am ready 
to swear, no signs of a fine frenzy. I was 
composed enough to perceive after some 
considerable time the match-box lying there 
on the mantelpiece right under my nose. 
And all this was beautifully and safely usual. 
Before I had thrown down the match my 
landlady's daughter appeared with her calm, 
pale face and an inquisitive look, in the door- 
way. Of late it was the landlady's daughter 
who answered my bell. I mention this little 
fact with pride, because it proves that during 
the thirty or forty days of my tenancy I had 
produced a favorable impression. For a fort- 

ii6 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

night past I had been spared the unattractive 
sight of the domestic slave. The girls in 
that Bessborough Gardens house were often 
changed, but whether short or long, fair or 
dark, they were always untidy and par- 
ticularly bedraggled, as if in a sordid version 
of the fairy tale the ash-bin cat had been 
changed into a maid. I was infinitely sen- 
sible of the privilege of being waited on by 
my landlady's daughter. She was neat if 
anemic. 

"Will you please clear away all this at 
once?" I addressed her in convulsive ac- 
cents, being at the same time engaged in 
getting my pipe to draw. This, I admit, 
was an unusual request. Generally, on get- 
ting up from breakfast I would sit down in the 
window with a book and let them clear the 
table when they liked; but if you think 
that on that morning I was in the least im- 
patient, you are mistaken. I remember that 
I was perfectly calm. As a matter of fact 
I was not at all certain that I wanted to 
write, or that I meant to write, or that I 
had anything to write about. No, I was not 
impatient. I lounged between the mantel- 
piece and the window, not even consciously 
waiting for the table to be cleared. It was 

117 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ten to one that before my landlady's daughter 
was done I would pick up a book and sit 
down with it all the morning in a spirit of 
enjoyable indolence. I affirm it with assur- 
ance, and I don't even know now what were 
the books then lying about the room. What- 
ever they were, they were not the works of 
great masters, where the secret of clear 
thought and exact expression can be found. 
Since the age of five I have been a great 
reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child 
who was never aware of learning to read. 
At ten years of age I had read much of Victor 
Hugo and other romantics. I had read in 
Polish and in French, history, voyages, novels; 
I knew Gil Bias and Do?i Quixote in abridged 
editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish 
poets and some French poets, but I cannot say 
what I read on the evening before I began to 
write myself. I believe it was a novel, and it 
is quite possible that it was one of Anthony 
Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My ac- 
quaintance with him was then very recent. 
He is one of the English novelists whose 
works I read for the first time in English. 
With men of European reputation, with 
Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, 
it was otherwise. My first introduction to 

ii8 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

English imaginative literature was Nicholas 
Nicklehy. It is extraordinary how well Mrs. 
Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish 
and the sinister Ralph rage in that language. 
As to the Crummies family and the family 
of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural 
to them as their native speech. It was, I 
have no doubt, an excellent translation. 
This must have been in the year '70. But 
I really believe that I am wrong. That 
book was not my first introduction to Eng- 
lish literature. My first acquaintance was 
(or were) the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and 
that in the very MS. of my father's transla- 
tion. It was during our exile in Russia, and it 
must have been less than a year after my 
mother's death, because I remember myself in 
the black blouse with a white border of my 
heavy mourning. We were living together, 
quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts 
of the town of T . That afternoon, in- 
stead of going out to play in the large yard 
which we shared with our landlord, I had 
lingered in the room in which my father 
generally wrote. What emboldened me to 
clamber into his chair I am sure I don't 
know, but a couple of hours afterward he 
discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows 

119 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

on the table and my head held in both hands 
over the MS. of loose pages. I was greatly 
confused, expecting to get into trouble. He 
stood in the doorway looking at me with 
some surprise, but the only thing he said after 
a moment of silence was: 

"Read the page aloud." 

Luckily the page lying before me was not 
overblotted with erasures and corrections, and 
my father's handwriting was otherwise ex- 
tremely legible. When I got to the end 
he nodded, and I flew out-of-doors, thinking 
myself lucky to have escaped reproof for 
that piece of impulsive audacity. I have 
tried to discover since the reason for this 
mildness, and I imagine that all unknown 
to myself I had earned, in my father's mind, 
the right to some latitude in my relations 
with his writing-table. It was only a month 
before — or perhaps it was only a week before 
— that I had read to him aloud from beginning 
to end, and to his perfect satisfaction, as he 
lay on his bed, not being very well at the 
time, the proofs of his translation of Victor 
Hugo's Toilers of the Sea. Such was my title 
to consideration, I believe, and also my first 
introduction to the sea in literature. If I 
do not remember where, how, and when I 

I30 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

learned to read, I am not likely to forget 
the process of being trained in the art of 
reading aloud. My poor father, an admirable 
reader himself, was the most exacting of 
masters. I reflect proudly that I must have 
read that page of Two Gentlemen of Verona 
tolerably well at the age of eight. The next 
time I met them was in a 55. one-volume 
edition of the dramatic works of William 
Shakespeare, read in Falmouth, at odd mo- 
ments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment 
of calkers' mallets driving oakum into the 
deck-seams of a ship in dry-dock. We had 
rim in, in a sinking condition and with the 
crew refusing duty after a month of weary 
battling with the gales of the North Atlantic. 
Books are an integral part of one's life, and 
my Shakespearian associations are with that 
first year of our bereavement, the last I spent 
with my father in exile (he sent me away 
to Poland to my mother's brother directly 
he could brace himself up for the separation), 
and with the year of hard gales, the year in 
which I came nearest to death at sea, first 
by water and then by fire. 

Those things I remember, but what I was 
reading the day before my writing life began 
I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion 

I2Z 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

that it might have been one of Trollope's 
poHtical novels. And I remember, too, the 
character of the day. It was an autumn day 
with an opahne atmosphere, a veiled, semi- 
opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and 
flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and win- 
dows opposite, while the trees of the square, 
with all their leaves gone, were like the trac- 
ings of India ink on a sheet of tissue-paper. 
It was one of those London days that have the 
charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating 
softness. The effect of opaline mist was often 
repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account 
of the nearness to the river. 

There is no reason why I should remember 
that effect more on that day than on any 
other day, except that I stood for a long time 
looking out of the window after the land- 
lady's daughter was gone with her spoil of 
cups and saucers. I heard her put the tray 
down in the passage and finally shut the door ; 
and still I remained smoking, with my back 
to the room. It is very clear that I was in 
no haste to take the plunge into my writing 
life, if as plunge this first attempt may be 
described. My whole being was steeped deep 
in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, 
the scene of never-ending labor and of un- 

122 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ceasing duty. For utter surrender to in- 
dolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when 
that mood is on him — ^the mood of absolute 
irresponsibility tasted to the full. It seems 
to me that I thought of nothing whatever, 
but this is an impression which is hardly to 
be believed at this distance of years. What 
I am certain of is that I was very far from 
thinking of writing a story, though it is pos- 
sible and even likely that I was thinking of 
the man Almayer. 

I had seen him for the first time, some four 
years before, from the bridge of a steamer 
moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, 
more or less, a Bornean river. It was very 
early morning, and a slight mist — an opaline 
mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without 
the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from 
the rays of the red London sun — promised to 
turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a 
small dug-out canoe on the river there was 
nothing moving within sight. I had just 
come up yawning from my cabin. The serang 
and the Malay crew were overhauling the 
cargo chains and trying the winches; their 
voices sounded subdued on the deck below, 
and their movements were languid. That 
tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay 

123 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

quartermaster, coming up to get something 
from the lockers on the bridge, shivered 
visibly. The forests above and below and 
on the opposite bank looked black and dank; 
wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly- 
stretched deck awnings, and it was in the 
middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught 
sight of Almayer. He was moving across a 
patch of burned grass, a blurred, shadowy 
shape with the blurred bulk of a house behind 
him, a low house of mats, bamboos, and palm- 
leaves, with a high-pitched roof of grass. 

He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad 
simply in flapping pajamas of cretonne pat- 
tern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on 
a disagreeable blue ground) and a thin cotton 
singlet with short sleeves. His arms, bare 
to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His 
black hair looked as if it had not been cut 
for a very long time, and a curly wisp of it 
strayed across his forehead. I had heard of 
him at Singapore; I had heard of him on 
board ; I had heard of him early in the morn- 
ing and late at night; I had heard of him at 
tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of him in a 
place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste 
gentleman there, who described himself as 
the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded 

124 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

civilized and progressive till you heard that 
the mine could not be worked at present 
because it was haunted by some particularly 
atrocious ghosts. I had heard of him in a 
place called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes, 
when the Rajah of that little-known seaport 
(you can get no anchorage there in less than 
fifteen fathom, which is extremely incon- 
venient) came on board in a friendly way, 
with only two attendants, and drank bottle 
after bottle of soda-water on the after-sky- 
light with my good friend and commander. 

Captain C . At least I heard his name 

distinctly pronounced several times in a lot 
of talk in Malay language. Oh yes, I heard it 
quite distinctly — ^Almayer, Almayer — and saw 

Captain C smile, while the fat, dingy 

Rajah laughed audibly. To hear a Malay Ra- 
jah laugh outright is a rare experience, I can as- 
sure you. And I overheard more of Almay- 
er' s name among our deck passengers (mostly 
wandering traders of good repute) as they sat 
all over the ship — each man fenced round with 
bundles and boxes — on mats, on pillows, on 
quilts, on billets of wood, conversing of Island 
affairs. Upon my word, I heard the mutter 
of Almayer's name faintly at midnight, while 
making my way aft from the bridge to look 
9 125 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

at the patent taffrail-log tinkling its quarter- 
miles in the great silence of the sea. I don't 
mean to say that our passengers dreamed 
aloud of Almayer, but it is indubitable that 
two of them at least, who could not sleep, 
apparently, and were trying to charm away 
the trouble of insomnia by a little whispered 
talk at that ghostly hour, were referring in 
some way or other to Almayer. It was 
really impossible on board that ship to get 
away definitely from Almayer; and a very 
small pony tied up forward and whisking its 
tail inside the galley, to the great embarrass- 
ment of our Chinaman cook, was destined for 
Almayer. What he wanted with a pony 
goodness only knows, since I am perfectly 
certain he could not ride it; but here you 
have the man, ambitious, aiming at the 
grandiose, importing a pony, whereas in the 
whole settlement at which he used to shake 
daily his impotent fist there was only one 
path that was practicable for a pony: a 
quarter of a mile at most, hedged in by him- 
dreds of square leagues of virgin forest. 
But who knows? The importation of that 
Bali pony might have been part of some deep 
scheme, of some diplomatic plan, of some 
hopeful intrigue. With Almayer one could 

126 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

never tell. He governed his conduct by con- 
siderations removed from the obvious, by 
incredible assumptions, which rendered his 
logic impenetrable to any reasonable person. 
I learned all this later. That morning, seeing 
the figure in pajamas moving in the mist, I 
said to myself, "That's the man." 

He came quite close to the ship's side and 
raised a harassed countenance, round and 
fiat, with that curl of black hair over the 
forehead and a heavy, pained glance. 

"Good morning." 

"Good morning." 

He looked hard at me: I was a new face, 
having just replaced the chief mate he was 
accustomed to see; and I think that this 
novelty inspired him, as things generally did, 
with deep-seated mistrust. 

"Didn't expect you till this evening," he 
remarked, suspiciously. 

I didn't know why he should have been 
aggrieved, but he seemed to be. I took 
pains to explain to him that, having picked 
up the beacon at the mouth of the river just 
before dark and the tide serving, Captain 

C was enabled to cross the bar and there 

was nothing to prevent him going up the 
river at night. 

127 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"Captain C knows this river like his 

own pocket," I concluded, discursively, try- 
ing to get on terms. 

"Better," said Almayer. 

Leaning over the rail of the bridge, I looked 
at Almayer, who looked down at the wharf 
in aggrieved thought. He shuffled his feet a 
little; he wore straw slippers with thick 
soles. The morning fog had thickened con- 
siderably. Everything round us dripped — the 
derricks, the rails, every single rope in the 
ship — as if a fit of crying had come upon the 
universe. 

Almayer again raised his head and, in the 
accents of a man accustomed to the buffets 
of evil fortune, asked, hardly audibly: 

"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as 
a pony on board?" 

I told him, almost in a whisper, for he 
attuned my communications to his minor key, 
that we had such a thing as a pony, and I 
hinted, as gently as I could, that he was 
confoundedly in the way, too. I was very 
anxious to have him landed before I began to 
handle the cargo. Almayer remained looking 
up at me for a long while, with incredulous 
and melancholy eyes, as though it were not 
a safe thing to believe in my statement. This 

128 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

pathetic mistrust in the favorable issue of 
any sort of affair touched me deeply, and I 
added : 

"He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the 
passage. He's a nice pony, too." 

Almayer was not to be cheered up; for 
all answer he cleared his throat and looked 
down again at his feet. I tried to close with 
him on another tack. 

"By Jove!" I said. "Aren't you afraid of 
catching pneumonia or bronchitis or some- 
thing, walking about in a singlet in such a 
wet fog?" 

He was not to be propitiated by a show of 
interest in his health. His answer was a 
sinister "No fear," as much as to say that 
even that way of escape from inclement for- 
tune was closed to him. 

"I just came down . . ." he mimibled, 
after a while. 

"Well, then, now you're here I will land 
that pony for you at once, and you can lead 
him home. I really don't want him on deck. 
He's in the way." 

Almayer seemed doubtful. I insisted: 

"Why, I will just swing him out and land 
him on the wharf right in front of you. I'd 
much rather do it before the hatches are off. 

129 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

The little devil may jump down the hold or 
do some other deadly thing." 

"There's a halter?" postulated Almayer. 

"Yes, of course there's a halter." And 
without waiting any more I leaned over the 
bridge rail. 

"Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony." 

The cook hastened to shut the door of the 
galley, and a moment later a great scuffle 
began on deck. The pony kicked with ex- 
treme energy, the kalashes skipped out of the 
way, the serang issued many orders in a cracked 
voice. Suddenly the pony leaped upon the 
fore-hatch. His little hoofs thundered tre- 
mendously; he plunged and reared. He had 
tossed his mane and his forelock into a state 
of amazing wildness, he dilated his nostrils, 
bits of foam flecked his broad little chest, his 
eyes blazed. He was something under eleven 
hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry, warlike; 
he said ha! ha! distinctly; he raged and 
thumped — and sixteen able-bodied kalashes 
stood round him like disconcerted nurses 
round a spoiled and passionate child. He 
whisked his tail incessantly; he arched his 
pretty neck; he was perfectly delightful; 
he was charmingly naughty. There was not 
an atom of vice in that performance; no 

130 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

savage baring of teeth and laying back of 
ears. On the contrary, he pricked them for- 
ward in a comically aggressive manner. He 
was totally unmoral and lovable; I would 
have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots. 
But life is a stem thing and the sense of duty 
the only safe guide. So I steeled my heart, 
and from my elevated position on the bridge 
I ordered the men to fling themselves upon 
him in a body. 

The elderly serang, emitting a strange in- 
articulate cry, gave the example. He was an 
excellent petty officer — very competent, in- 
deed, and a moderate opium-smoker. The 
rest of them in one great rush smothered that 
pony. They hung on to his ears, to his mane, 
to his tail; they lay in piles across his back, 
seventeen in all. The carpenter, seizing the 
hook of the cargo-chain, flung himself on the 
top of them. A very satisfactory petty 
officer, too, but he stuttered. Have you ever 
heard a light-yellow, lean, sad, earnest China- 
man stutter in Pidgin-English? It's very 
weird, indeed. He made the eighteenth. I 
could not see the pony at all; but from the 
swaying and heaving of that heap of men 
I knew that there was something alive 
inside. 

131 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

From the wharf Almayer hailed, in quaver- 
ing tones: 

"Oh, I say!" 

Where he stood he could not see what 
was going on on deck, unless, perhaps, the 
tops of the men's heads; he could only hear 
the scuffle, the mighty thuds, as if the ship 
were being knocked to pieces. I looked over: 
"What is it?" 

"Don't let them break his legs," he en- 
treated me, plaintively. 

"Oh, nonsense! He's all right now. He 
can't move." 

By that time the cargo-chain had been 
hooked to the broad canvas belt round the 
pony's body; the kalashes sprang off simul- 
taneously in all directions, rolling over each 
other; and the worthy serang, making a dash 
behind the winch, turned the steam on. 

"Steady!" I yelled, in great apprehension of 
seeing the animal snatched up to the very 
head of the derrick. 

On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw 
slippers uneasily. The rattle of the winch 
stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence 
that pony began to swing across the deck. 

How limp he was ! Directly he felt himself 
in the air he relaxed every muscle in a most 

132 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

wonderful manner. His four hoofs knocked 
together in a bunch, his head hung down, and 
his tail remained pendent in a nerveless and 
absolute immobility. He reminded me vividly 
of the pathetic little sheep which hangs on 
the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece. 
I had no idea that anything in the shape of 
a horse could be so limp as that, either living 
or dead. His wild mane hung down lumpily, 
a mere mass of inanimate horsehair; his ag- 
gressive ears had collapsed, but as he went 
swaying slowly across the front of the bridge 
I noticed an astute gleam in his dreamy, half- 
closed eye. A trustworthy quartermaster, 
his glance anxious and his mouth on the 
broad grin, was easing over the derrick 
watchfully. I superintended, greatly inter- 
ested. 

"So! That will do." 

The derrick-head stopped. The kalashes 
lined the rail. The rope of the halter hung 
perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull 
in front of Almayer. Everything was very 
still. I suggested amicably that he should 
catch hold of the rope and mind what he was 
about. He extended a provokingly casual and 
superior hand. 

' ' Look out, then ! Lower away !' ' 
133 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently 
enough, but when the pony's hoofs touched 
the wharf he gave way all at once to a most 
foolish optimism. Without pausing, with- 
out thinking, almost without looking, he dis- 
engaged the hook suddenly from the sling, 
and the cargo-chain, after hitting the pony's 
quarters, swung back against the ship's side 
with a noisy, rattling slap. I suppose I must 
have blinked. I know I missed something, be- 
cause the next thing I saw was Almayer lying 
flat on his back on the jetty. He was alone. 

Astonishment deprived me of speech long 
enough to give Almayer time to pick himself 
up in a leisurely and painful manner. The 
kalashes lining the rail all had their mouths 
open. The mist flew in the light breeze, 
and it had come over quite thick enough to 
hide the shore completely. 

"How on earth did you manage to let him 
get away?" I asked, scandalized. 

Almayer looked into the smarting palm of 
his right hand, but did not answer my in- 
quiry. 

"Where do you think he will get to?" I 
cried. "Are there any fences anywhere in 
this fog? Can he bolt into the forest? 
What's to be done now?" 

134 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Almayer shrugged his shoulders. 

"Some of my m^en are sure to be about. 
They will get hold of him sooner or later." 

"Sooner or later! That's all very fine, 
but what about my canvas sling? — he's carried 
it off. I want it now, at once, to land two 
Celebes cows." 

Since Dongola we had on board a pair 
of the pretty little island cattle in addition 
to the pony. Tied up on the other side of 
the fore-deck they had been whisking their 
tails into the other door of the galley. These 
cows were not for Almayer, however; they 
were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim, his 
enemy. Almayer's disregard of my require- 
ments was complete. 

"If I were you I would try to find out 
where he's gone," I insisted. "Hadn't you 
better call your men together or something? 
He will throw himself down and cut his knees. 
He may even break a leg, you know." 

But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, 
did not seem to want that pony any more. 
Amazed at this sudden indifference, I turned 
all hands out on shore to hunt for him on my 
own account, or, at any rate, to hunt for the 
canvas sling which he had round his body. 
The whole crew of the steamer, with the 

135 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

exception of firemen and engineers, rushed up 
the jetty, past the thoughtful Almayer, and 
vanished from my sight. The white fog 
swallowed them up; and again there was a 
deep silence that seemed to extend for miles 
up and down the stream. Still taciturn, 
Almayer started to climb on board, and I 
went down from the bridge to meet him on 
the after-deck. 

"Would you mind telling the captain that 
I want to see him very particularly?" he 
asked me, in a low tone, letting his eyes stray 
all over the place. 

"Very well. I will go and see." 

With the door of his cabin wide open, 

Captain C , just back from the bath-room, 

big and broad-chested, was brushing his 
thick, damp, iron-gray hair with two large 
brushes. 

"Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see 
you very particularly, sir." 

Saying these words, I smiled. I don't know 
why I smiled, except that it seemed absolutely 
impossible to mention Almayer' s name with- 
out a smile of a sort. It had not to be 
necessarily a mirthful smile. Turning his 

head toward me, Captain C smiled, too, 

rather joylessly. 

136 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"The pony got away from him — eh?" 

"Yes, sir. He did." 

"Where is he?" 

"Goodness only knows." 

"No. I mean Almayer. Let him come 
along." 

The captain's stateroom opening straight 
on deck under the bridge, I had only to 
beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who 
had remained aft, with downcast eyes, on the 
very spot where I had left him. He strolled 
up moodily, shook hands, and at once asked 
permission to shut the cabin door. 

"I have a pretty story to tell you," were 
the last words I heard. The bitterness of 
tone was remarkable. 

I went away from the door, of course. 
For the moment I had no crew on board; 
only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas 
bag hung round his neck and a hammer in 
his hand, roam'ed about the empty decks, 
knocking out the wedges of the hatches and 
dropping them into the bag conscientiously. 
Having nothing to do I joined our two en- 
gineers at the door of the engine-room. It 
was near breakfast-time. 

"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" com- 
mented the second engineer, and smiled in- 

137 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

differently. He was an abstemious man, 
with a good digestion and a placid, reason- 
able view of life even when hungry. 

"Yes," I said. "Shut up with the old 
man. Some very particular business." 

"He will spin him a damned endless 
yarn," observed the chief engineer. 

He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspep- 
tic, and suffered from gnawing hunger in the 
morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile 
that made two vertical folds on his shaven 
cheeks. And I smiled, too, but I was not 
exactly amused. In that man, whose name 
apparently could not be uttered an3rwhere in 
the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there 
was nothing amusing whatever. That morn- 
ing he breakfasted with us silently, looking 
mostly into his cup. I informed him that 
my men came upon his pony capering in the 
fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep 
well in which he kept his store of guttah. 
The cover was off, with no one near by, and 
the whole of my crew just missed going heels 
over head into that beastly hole. Jurumudi 
Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine 
needlework, he who mended the ship's flags 
and sewed buttons on our coats, was dis- 
abled by a kick on the shoulder. 

138 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Both remorse and gratitude seemed for- 
eign to Almayer's character. He mumbled: 

"Do you mean that pirate fellow?" 

''What pirate fellow? The man has been 
in the ship eleven years," I said, indignantly. 

"It's his looks," Almayer muttered, for all 
apology. 

The Sim had eaten up the fog. From 
where we sat under the after-awning we could 
see in the distance the pony tied up, in front 
of Almayer's house, to a post of the veran- 
da. We were silent for a long time. All 
at once Almayer, alluding evidently to the 
subject of his conversation in the captain's 
cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table: 

"I really don't know what I can do now!" 

Captain C only raised his eyebrows 

at him, and got up from his chair. We dis- 
persed to our duties, but Almayer, half 
dressed as he was in his cretonne pajamas 
and the thin cotton singlet, remained on 
board, lingering near the gangway, as though 
he could not make up his mind whether to 
go home or stay with us for good. Our 
Chinamen boys gave him side glances as 
they went to and fro; and Ah Sing, our 
chief steward, the handsomest and most sym- 
pathetic of Chinamen, catching my eye, 

139 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

nodded knowingly at his burly back. In 
the course of the morning I approached 
him for a moment. 

"Well, Mr. Almayer," I addressed him, 
easily, "you haven't started on yoirr letters 
yet." 

We had brought him his mail, and he had 
held the bundle in his hand ever since we got 
up from breakfast. He glanced at it when 
I spoke, and for a moment it looked as if 
he were on the point of opening his fingers 
and letting the whole lot fall overboard. I 
believe he was tempted to do so. I shall 
never forget that man afraid of his let- 
ters. 

"Have you been long out from Europe?" 
he asked me. 

"Not very. Not quite eight months," I 
told him. "I left a ship in Samarang with a 
hurt back, and have been in the hospital in 
Singapore some weeks." 

He sighed. 

"Trade is very bad here." 

"Indeed!" 

"Hopeless! . . . See these geese?" 

With the hand holding the letters he point- 
ed out to me what resembled a patch of 
snow creeping and swaying across the dis- 

140 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

tant part of his compound. It disappeared 
behind some bushes. 

''The only geese on the East Coast," Al- 
mayer informed me, in a perfunctory mutter 
without a spark of faith, hope, or pride. 
Thereupon, with the same absence of any 
sort of sustaining spirit, he declared his in- 
tention to select a fat bird and send him on 
board for us not later than next day. 

I had heard of these largesses before. He 
conferred a goose as if it were a sort of court 
decoration given only to the tried friends of 
the house. I had expected more pomp in 
the ceremony. The gift had surely its special 
quality, multiple and rare. From the only 
flock on the East Coast! He did not make 
half enough of it. That man did not under- 
stand his opportunities. However, T thanked 
him at some length. 

"You see," he interrupted, abruptly, in a 
very peculiar tone, "the worst of this coun- 
try is that one is not able to realize . . . it's 
impossible to realize. ..." His voice sank 
into a languid mutter. "And when one has 
very large interests . . . very important in- 
terests . . ."he finished, faintly . . . "up the 
river." 

We looked at each other. He astonished 

lo 141 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

me by giving a start and making a very- 
queer grimace. 

"Well, I must be off," he burst out, hur- 
riedly. "So long!" 

At the moment of stepping over the gang- 
way he checked himself, though, to give me 
a mumbled invitation to dine at his house 
that evening with my captain, an invitation 
which I accepted. I don't think it could 
have been possible for me to refuse. 

I like the worthy folk who will talk to you 
of the exercise of free-will, "at any rate for 
practical purposes." Free, is it? For prac- 
tical purposes ! Bosh ! How could I have re- 
fused to dine with that man? I did not refuse, 
simply because I could not refuse. Curios- 
ity, a healthy desire for a change of cooking, 
common civility, the talk and the smiles of 
the previous twenty days, every condition 
of my existence at that moment and place 
made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crown- 
ing all that, there was the ignorance — the 
ignorance, I say — the fatal want of fore- 
knowledge to counterbalance these impera- 
tive conditions of the problem. A refusal 
would have appeared perverse and insane. 
Nobody, unless a surly lunatic, would have 
refused. But if I had not got to know Al- 

142 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

mayer pretty well it is almost certain there 
would never have been a line of mine in print. 

I accepted then — and I am paying yet the 
price of my sanity. The possessor of the 
only flock of geese on the East Coast is re- 
sponsible for the existence of some fourteen 
volumes, so far. The number of geese he 
had called into being under adverse climatic 
conditions was considerably more than four- 
teen. The tale of volumes will never over- 
take the counting of heads, I am safe to say; 
but my ambitions point not exactly that way, 
and whatever the pangs the toil of writing 
has cost me I have always thought kindly 
of Almayer. 

I wonder, had he known anything of it, 
what his attitude would have been? This 
is something not to be discovered in this 
world. But if we ever meet in the Elysian 
Fields — where I cannot depict him to myself 
otherwise than attended in the distance by 
his flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter) — 
and he addresses me in the stillness of that 
passionless region, neither light nor darkness, 
neither sound nor silence, and heaving end- 
lessly with billowy mists from the impalpable 
multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I 
know what answer to make. 

143 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I woiild say, after listening courteously to 
the unvibrating tone of his measured remon- 
strances, which should not disturb, of course, 
the solemn eternity of stillness in the least — 
I would say something like this: 

"It is true, Almayer, that in the world 
below I have converted your name to my 
own uses. But that is a very small larceny. 
What's in a name, O Shade? If so much of 
your old mortal weakness clings to you yet 
as to make you feel aggrieved (it was the 
note of your earthly voice, Almayer), then, 
I entreat you, seek speech without delay 
with our sublime fellow-Shade — with him 
who, in his transient existence as a poet, 
commented upon the smell of the rose. He 
will comfort you. You came to me stripped 
of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the 
disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader 
in the Islands. Your name was the common 
property of the winds; it, as it were, floated 
naked over the waters about the equator. I 
wrapped round its unhonored form the royal 
mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to 
put into the hollow sound the very anguish 
of paternity — feats which you did not de- 
mand from me — ^but remember that all the 
toil and all the pain were mine. In your 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

earthly life you haunted me, Almayer. Con- 
sider that this was taking a great liberty. 
Since you were always complaining of being 
lost to the world, you should remember that 
if I had not believed enough in your exist- 
ence to let you haunt my rooms in Bess- 
borough Gardens, you would have been much 
more lost. You affirm that had I been ca- 
pable of looking at you with a more perfect 
detachment and a greater simplicity, I might 
have perceived better the inward marvel- 
ousness which, you insist, attended your 
career upon that tiny pin-point of light, 
hardly visible far, far below us, where both 
our graves lie. No doubt! But reflect, O 
complaining Shade! that this was not so 
much my fault as yoiu" crowning misfortime. 
I believed in you in the only way it was 
possible for me to believe. It was not 
worthy of your merits? So be it. But you 
were always an unlucky man, Almayer. 
Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. 
What made you so real to me was that you 
held this lofty theory with some force of 
conviction and with an admirable consis- 
tency." 

It is with some such words translated 
into the proper shadowy expressions that 

HS 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I am prepared to placate Almayer in the 
Elysian Abode of Shades, since it has 
come to pass that, having parted many 
years ago, we are never to meet again in this 
world. 



V 



In the career of the most unUterary of 
writers, in the sense that literary ambition 
had never entered the world of his imagination, 
the coming into existence of the first book 
is quite an inexplicable event. In my own 
case I cannot trace it back to any mental 
or psychological cause which one could point 
out and hold to. The greatest of my 
gifts being a consummate capacity for doing 
nothing, I cannot even point to boredom 
as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. 
The pen, at any rate, was there, and there 
is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody 
keeps a pen (the cold steel of our days) in 
his rooms, in this enlightened age of penny 
stamps and halfpenny post-cards. In fact, 
this was the epoch when by means of post- 
card and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the 
reputation of a novel or two. And I, too, 
had a pen rolling about somewhere — the 
seldom-used, the reluctantly taken-up pen of 
a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried 

U7 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ink of abandoned attempts, of answers de- 
layed longer than decency permitted, of letters 
begun with infinite reluctance and put off 
suddenly till next day — till next week, as like 
as not! The neglected, uncared-for pen, 
flimg away at the slightest provocation, and 
under the stress of dire necessity hunted for 
without enthusiasm, in a perfunctory, grumpy 
worry, in the "Where the devil is the beastly 
thing gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where, 
indeed! It might have been reposing behind 
the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's 
anemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have 
expressed it), though commendably neat, had 
a lordly, careless manner of approaching her 
domestic duties. Or it might even be rest- 
ing delicately poised on its point by the side 
of the table-leg, and when picked up show a 
gaping, inefficient beak which would have dis- 
couraged any man of literary instincts. But 
not me! "Never mind. This will do." 

O days without guile ! If anybody had told 
me then that a devoted household, having 
a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and 
importance, would be put into a state of 
tremor and flurry by the fuss I would make 
because of a suspicion that somebody had 
touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I 

148 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

wotdd have never deigned as much as the 
contemptuous smile of unbeUef. There are 
imaginings too unUkely for any kind of notice, 
too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a 
smile. Perhaps, had that seer of the future 
been a friend, I should have been secretly 
saddened. "Alas!" I would have thought, 
looking at him with an unmoved face, "the 
poor fellow is going mad." 

I would have been, without doubt, sad- 
dened ; for in this world where the joiunalists 
read the signs of the sky, and the wind of 
heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does 
so under the prophetical management of the 
meteorological office, but where the secret 
of human hearts cannot be captured by prying 
or praying, it was infinitely more likely that 
the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ 
of incipient madness than that I should turn 
into a writer of tales. 

To survey with wonder the changes of one's 
own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours. 
The field is so wide, the surprises so varied, 
the subject so full of unprofitable but curious 
hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one 
does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking 
here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under 
the crown of their unboimded conceit — ^who 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

really never rest in this world, and when out 
of it go on fretting and fuming on the strait- 
ened circumstances of their last habitation, 
where all men must lie in obscure equality. 
Neither am I thinking of those ambitious 
minds who, always looking forward to some 
aim of aggrandizement, can spare no time for 
a detached, impersonal glance upon them- 
selves. 

And that's a pity. They are unlucky. 
These two kinds, together with the much 
larger band of the totally unimaginative, 
of those unfortunate beings in whose empty 
and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer 
has put it) "the whole universe vanishes into 
blank nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true 
task of us men whose day is short on this 
earth, the abode of conflicting opinions. The 
ethical view of the universe involves us at 
last in so many cruel and absurd contradic- 
tions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, 
charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready 
to perish, that I have come to suspect that 
the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. 
I would fondly believe that its object is purely 
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adora- 
tion, or hate, if you like, but in this view — and 
in this view alone — never for despair! Those 

150 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end 
in themselves. The rest is our affair — the 
laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the in- 
dignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled 
heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind 
— that's our affair! And the unwearied self- 
forgetful attention to every phase of the 
living universe reflected in our consciousness 
may be our appointed task on this earth — 
a task in which fate has perhaps engaged 
nothing of us except our conscience, gifted 
with a voice in order to bear true testimony 
to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, 
the infinite passion, and the illimitable seren- 
ity ; to the supreme law and the abiding mys- 
tery of the sublime spectacle. 

Chi lo sa ? It may be true. In this view 
there is room for every religion except for 
the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and 
cloak of arid despair; for every joy and every 
sorrow, for every fair dream, for every 
charitable hope. The great aim is to remain 
true to the emotions called out of the deep 
encircled by the firmament of stars, whose 
infinite nimibers and awful distances may 
move us to laughter or tears (was it the 
Walrus or the Carpenter, in the poem, who 
"wept to see such quantities of sand"?), or, 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter 
nothing at all. 

The casual quotation, which had suggested 
itself out of a poem full of merit, leads me 
to remark that in the conception of a purely 
spectacular universe, where inspiration of 
every sort has a rational existence, the artist 
of every kind finds a natural place ; and among 
them the poet as the seer par excellence. Even 
the writer of prose, who in his less noble and 
more toilsome task should be a man with the 
steeled heart, is worthy of a place, providing 
he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps 
laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh 
or cry. Yes! Even he, the prose artist of 
fiction, which after all is but truth often 
dragged out of a well and clothed in the 
painted robe of imagined phrases — even he 
has his place among kings, demagogues, 
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, cabinet 
ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, 
scientists, Kafirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, 
lawyers, dandies, microbes, and constellations 
of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a 
moral end in itself. 

Here I perceive (without speaking offense) 
the reader assimiing a subtle expression, as 
if the cat were out of the bag. I take the 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

novelist's freedom to observe the reader's 
mind formulating the exclamation: "That's 
it! The fellow talks pro domo.'" 

Indeed it was not the intention! When 
I shouldered the bag I was not aware of the 
cat inside. But, after all, why not? The 
fair courtyards of the House of Art are 
thronged by many humble retainers. And 
there is no retainer so devoted as he who is 
allowed to sit on the doorstep. The fellows 
who have got inside are apt to think too much 
of themselves. This last remark, I beg to 
state, is not malicious within the definition 
of the law of libel. It's fair comment on a 
matter of public interest. But never mind. 
Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que 
vous voudrez. And yet in truth I was by no 
means anxious to justify my existence. The 
attempt would have been not only needless 
and absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a 
purely spectacular universe, where no such 
disagreeable necessity can possibly arise. It 
is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at 
some length in these pages) : J'aivecu. I have 
existed, obscure among the wonders and 
terrors of my time, as the Abbe Sieyes, the 
original utterer of the quoted words, had 
managed to exist through the violences, the 

153 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

crimes, and the enthusiasms of the French 
Revolution. Tai vecu, as I apprehend most 
of us manage to exist, missing all along the 
varied forms of destruction by a hair's-breadth, 
saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps my 
soul also, but not without some damage here 
and there to the fine edge of my conscience, 
that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the 
group, of the family, colorable and plastic, 
fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, 
and even by the silences and abstentions 
surrounding one's childhood; tinged in a 
complete scheme of delicate shades and crude 
colors by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or 
prejudices — unaccountable, despotic, persua- 
sive, and often, in its texture, romantic. 

And often romantic! . . . The matter in 
hand, however, is to keep these reminis- 
cences from turning into confessions, a form 
of literary activity discredited by Jean 
Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme 
thoroughness he brought to the work of 
justifying his own existence; for that such 
was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, 
visible to an unprejudiced eye. But then, 
you see, the man was not a writer of fiction. 
He was an artless moralist, as is clearly 
demonstrated by his anniversaries being cele- 

154 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

brated with marked emphasis by the heirs 
of the French Revolution, which was not a 
poHtical movement at all, but a great out- 
burst of morality. He had no imagination, 
as the most casual perusal of Emile will 
prove. He was no novelist, whose first vir- 
tue is the exact understanding of the limits 
traced by the reality of his time to the play 
of his invention. Inspiration comes from the 
earth, which has a past, a history, a future, 
not from the cold and immutable heaven. 
A writer of imaginative prose (even more 
than any other sort of artist) stands con- 
fessed in his works. His conscience, his 
deeper sense of things, lawful and unlawful, 
gives him his attitude before the world. 
Indeed, every one who puts pen to paper 
for the reading of strangers (unless a moral- 
ist, who, generally speaking, has no con- 
science except the one he is at pains to 
produce for the use of others) can speak of 
nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the 
most eloquent and just of French prose- 
writers, who says that we must recognize 
at last that, "failing the resolution to hold 
our peace, we can only talk of ourselves." 

This remark, if I remember rightly, was 
made in the course of a sparring match with 

155 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the prin- 
ciples and rules of literary criticism. As was 
fitting for a man to whom we owe the mem- 
orable saying, "The good critic is he who 
relates the adventures of his soul among 
masterpieces," M. Anatole France main- 
tained that there were no rules and no prin- 
ciples. And that may be very true. Rules, 
principles, and standards die and vanish every 
day. Perhaps they are all dead and vanished by 
this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free 
days of destroyed landmarks, while the in- 
genious minds are busy inventing the forms 
of the new beacons which, it is consoling to 
think, will be set up presently in the old 
places. But what is interesting to a writer 
is the possession of an inward certitude that 
literary criticism will never die, for man (so 
variously defined) is, before everything else, 
a critical animal. And as long as distin- 
guished minds are ready to treat it in the 
spirit of high adventure literary criticism 
shall appeal to us with all the charm and 
wisdom of a well-told tale of personal ex- 
perience. 

For Englishmen especially, of all the races 
of the earth, a task, any task, undertaken 
in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit 

is6 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of romance. But the critics as a rule exhibit 
but Httle of an adventurous spirit. They 
take risks, of course — one can hardly live with- 
out that. The daily bread is served out to 
us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt. 
Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one 
prays for, and that would be not only im- 
proper, but impious. From impiety of that 
or any other kind — save us! An ideal of re- 
served manner, adhered to from a sense of 
proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or cau- 
tion, or simply from weariness, induces, I 
suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal 
the adventurous side of their calling, and then 
the criticism becomes a mere "notice," as 
it were, the relation of a journey where noth- 
ing but the distances and the geology of a 
new country should be set down ; the glimpses 
of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and 
field, the hairbreadth escapes, and the suf- 
ferings (oh, the sufferings, too! I have no 
doubt of the sufferings) of the traveler being 
carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful 
plant being ever mentioned either; so that 
the whole performance looks like a mere feat 
of agility on the part of a trained pen running 
in a desert. A cruel spectacle — a most de- 
plorable adventure! "Life," in the words 
" 157 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of an immortal thinker of, I should say, 
bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is 
lost to the worship of posterity — "life is 
not all beer and skittles." Neither is the 
writing of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous 
donne ma parole d'honneur that it — is — not. 
Not all. I am thus emphatic because some 
years ago, I remember, the daughter of a 
general. . . . 

Sudden revelations of the profane world 
must have come now and then to hermits 
in their cells, to the cloistered monks of 
middle ages, to lonely sages, men of science, 
reformers; the revelations of the world's 
superficial judgment, shocking to the souls 
concentrated upon their own bitter labor in 
the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of 
temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the 
art of cracking jokes or playing the flute. 
And thus this general's daughter came to me 
— or I should say one of the general's daughters 
did. There were three of these bachelor 
ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a 
neighboring farm-house in a united and more 
or less military occupation. The eldest warred 
against the decay of manners in the village 
children, and executed frontal attacks upon the 
village mothers for the conquest of courtesies. 

158 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

It sounds futile, but it was really a war for 
an idea. The second skirmished and scouted 
all over the country; and it was that one 
who pushed a reconnaissance right to my 
very table — I mean the one who wore stand- 
up collars. She was really calling upon my 
wife in the soft spirit of afternoon friendli- 
ness, but with her usual martial determination. 
She marched into my room swinging her 
stick . . . but no — I mustn't exaggerate. 
It is not my specialty. I am not a humorist ic 
writer. In all soberness, then, all I am cer- 
tain of is that she had a stick to swing. 

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. 
The window was open; the door, too, stood 
open to that best friend of my work, the 
warm, still sunshine of the wide fields. They 
lay around me infinitely helpful, but, truth 
to say, I had not known for weeks whether 
the sun shone upon the earth and whether 
the stars above still moved on their appointed 
courses. I was just then giving up some 
days of my allotted span to the last chapters 
of the novel Nostromo, a tale of an imaginary 
(but true) seaboard, which is still mentioned 
now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes 
in connection with the word "failure" and 
sometimes in conjunction with the word 

159 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"astonishing." I have no opinion on this 
discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that 
can never be settled. All I know is that, for 
twenty months, neglecting the common joys 
of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on 
this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, 
"wrestled with the Lord" for my creation, 
for the headlands of the coast, for the dark- 
ness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, 
the clouds in the sky, and for the breath 
of life that had to be blown into the shapes 
of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of 
Jew and Gentile. These are, perhaps, strong 
words, but it is difficult to characterize other- 
wise the intimacy and the strain of a creative 
effort in which mind and will and conscience 
are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day 
after day, away from the world, and to the 
exclusion of all that makes life really lovable 
and gentle — something for which a material 
parallel can only be found in the everlasting 
somber stress of the westward winter passage 
round Cape Horn. For that, too, is the 
wrestling of men with the might of their 
Creator, in a great isolation from the world, 
without the amenities and consolations of life, 
a lonely struggle under a sense of overmatched 
littleness, for no reward that could be ade- 

i6o 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

quate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. 
Yet a certain longitude, once won, cannot be 
disputed. The sun and the stars and the 
shape of your earth are the witnesses of your 
gain; whereas a handful of pages, no matter 
how much you have made them your own, 
are at best but an obscure and questionable 
spoil. Here they are. "Failure" — "Aston- 
ishing": take your choice; or perhaps both, 
or neither — a mere rustle and flutter of pieces 
of paper settling down in the night, and un- 
distinguishable, like the snowflakes of a great 
drift destined to melt away in sunshine. 

"How do you do?" 

It was the greeting of the general's daugh- 
ter. I had heard nothing — no rustle, no foot- 
steps. I had felt only a moment before a 
sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense 
of an inauspicious presence — just that much 
warning and no more; and then came the 
sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible 
fall from a great height — a fall, let us say, 
from the highest of the clouds floating in 
gentle procession over the fields in the faint 
westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked 
myself up quickly, of course; in other words, 
I jumped up from my chair stunned and dazed, 
every nerve quivering with the pain of being 

i6i 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

uprooted out of one world and flung down 
into another — perfectly civil. 

"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit 
down?" 

That's what I said. This horrible but, I 
assure you, perfectly true reminiscence tells 
you more than a whole volume of confessions 
a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Ob- 
serve! I didn't howl at her, or start up- 
setting furniture, or throw myself on the 
floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any 
other way at the appalling magnitude of the 
disaster. The whole world of Costaguana 
(the country, you may remember, of my sea- 
board tale), men, women, headlands, houses, 
mountains, town, campo (there was not a single 
brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had 
not placed in position with my own hands) ; 
all the history, geography, politics, finance; 
the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine, and 
the splendor of the magnificent Capataz de 
Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the 
night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over 
his head — in Linda Viola's voice), dominated 
even after death the dark gulf containing his 
conquests of treasure and love — all that had 
come down crashing about my ears. I felt 
I could never pick up the pieces — and in that 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

very moment I was saying, "Won't you sit 
down?" 

The sea is strong medicine. Behold what 
the quarter-deck training even in a merchant 
ship will do! This episode should give you 
a new view of the English and Scots seamen 
(a much-caricatured folk) who had the last 
say in the formation of my character. One 
is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster 
I think I have done some honor to their 
simple teaching. ''Won't you sit down?" 
Very fair; very fair, indeed. She sat down. 
Her amused glance strayed all over the room. 
There were pages of MS. on the table and 
under the table, a batch of typed copy on a 
chair, single leaves had fluttered away into 
distant corners; there were there living pages, 
pages scored and wounded, dead pages that 
would be burned at the end of the day — the 
litter of a cruel battle-field, of a long, long, 
and desperate fray. Long ! I suppose I went 
to bed sometimes, and got up the same number 
of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the 
food put before me, and talked connectedly 
to my household on suitable occasions. But I 
had never been aware of the even flow of 
daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by 
a silent, watchful, tireless affection. Indeed, 

163 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

it seemed to me that I had been sitting at that 
table surrounded by the Htter of a desperate 
fray for days and nights on end. It seemed 
so, because of the intense weariness of which 
that interruption had made me aware — the 
awful disenchantment of a mind realizing 
suddenly the futility of an enormous task, 
joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary 
amount of fairly heavy physical labor could 
ever account for. I have carried bags of 
wheat on my back, bent almost double under 
a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning 
till six in the evening (with an hour and a half 
off for meals), so I ought to know. 

And I love letters. I am jealous of their 
honor and concerned for the dignity and 
comeliness of their service. I was, most 
likely, the only writer that neat lady had 
ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and 
it distressed me not to be able to remember 
when it was that I dressed myself last, and 
how. No doubt that would be all right in 
essentials. The fortune of the house in- 
cluded a pair of gray-blue watchful eyes that 
would see to that. But I felt, somehow, as 
grimy as a Costaguana leper o after a day's 
fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and 
disheveled down to my very heels. And I 

164 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

am afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was 
bad for the honor of letters and the dignity of 
their service. Seen indistinctly through the 
dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady 
glanced about the room with a slightly amused 
serenity. And she was smiling. What on 
earth was she smiling at? She remarked, 
casually : 

"I am afraid I interrupted you." 

"Not at all." 

She accepted the denial in perfect good 
faith. And it was strictly true. Interrupted 
— indeed! She had robbed me of at least 
twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and 
real than her own, because informed with 
passion, possessed of convictions, involved in 
great affairs created out of my own substance 
for an anxiously meditated end. 

She remained silent for a while, then said, 
with a last glance all round at the litter of the 
fray: 

"And you sit like this here writing your 
— ^your . . ." 

' * I— what ? Oh yes ! I sit here all day . ' ' 

"It must be perfectly delightful." 

I suppose that, being no longer very young, 
I might have been on the verge of having 
a stroke; but she had left her dog in the 

i6s 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling the field 
in front, had espied him from afar. He came 
on straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and 
the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly 
upon our ears, was more than enough to 
scare away a fit of apoplexy. We went out 
hastily and separated the gallant animals. 
Afterward I told the lady where she would 
find my wife — just round the corner, under 
the trees. She nodded and went off with her 
dog, leaving me appalled before the death and 
devastation she had lightly made — and with 
the awfully instructive sound of the word 
"delightful" lingering in my ears. 

Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her 
to the field gate. I wanted to be civil, of 
course (what are twenty lives in a mere novel 
that one should be rude to a lady on their 
account?), but mainly, to adopt the good, 
sound Ollendorfiian style, because I did not 
want the dog of the general's daughter to 
fight again {encore) with the faithful dog of 
my infant son {mon petit gar con). — ^Was I 
afraid that the dog of the general's daughter 
would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog 
of my child? — No, I was not afraid. . . . 
But away with the Ollendorff method. How- 
ever appropriate and seemingly unavoidable 

i66 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

when I touch upon anything appertaining 
to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, 
character, and history of the dog ; for the dog 
was the gift to the child from a man for whom 
words had anything but an Ollendorfhan 
value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive 
movements of his untutored genius, the most 
single-minded of verbal impressionists, using 
his great gifts of straight feeling and right 
expression with a fine sincerity and a strong 
if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. 
His art did not obtain, I fear, all the credit 
its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I 
am alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the 
author of The Red Badge of Courage, a work 
of imagination which found its short moment 
of celebrity in the last decade of the departed 
century. Other books followed. Not many. 
He had not the time. It was an individual 
and complete talent which obtained but a 
grudging, somewhat supercilious recognition 
from the world at large. For himself one 
hesitates to regret his early death. Like one 
of the men in his Open Boat, one felt that he 
was of those whom fate seldom allows to 
make a safe landing after much toil and 
bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding 
affection for that energetic, sUght, fragile, 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

intensely living and transient figure. He 
liked me, even before we met, on the strength 
of a page or two of my writing, and after we 
had met I am glad to think he liked me still. 
He used to point out to me with great earnest- 
ness, and even with some severity, that "a 
boy ought to have a dog." I suspect that he 
was shocked at my neglect of parental duties. 
Ultimately it was he who provided the dog. 
Shortly afterward, one day, after playing 
with the child on the rug for an hour or so 
with the most intense absorption, he raised 
his head and declared firmly, "I shall teach 
your boy to ride." That was not to be. 
He was not given the time. 

But here is the dog — an old dog now. 
Broad and low on his bandy paws, with a 
black head on a white body and a ridiculous 
black spot at the other end of him, he pro- 
vokes, when he walks abroad, smiles not 
altogether unkind. Grotesque and engaging 
in the whole of his appearance, his usual 
attitudes are meek, but his temperament 
discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in 
the presence of his kind. As he lies in the 
firelight, his head well up, and a fixed, far- 
away gaze directed at the shadows of the 
room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose 

i68 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

in the calm consciousness of an unstained 
life. He has brought up one baby, and now, 
after seeing his first charge off to school, he is 
bringing up another with the same con- 
scientious devotion, but with a more delibe- 
rate gravity of manner, the sign of greater 
wisdom and riper experience, but also of 
rheumatism, I fear. From the morning bath 
to the evening ceremonies of the cot, you 
attend the little two-legged creature of your 
adoption, being yourself treated in the exer- 
cise of your duties with every possible regard^ 
with infinite consideration, by every person 
in the house — even as I myself am treated; 
only you deserve it more. The general's 
daughter would tell you that it must be 
"perfectly delightful." 

Aha! old dog. She never heard you yelp 
with acute pain (it's that poor left ear) the 
while, with incredible self-command, you 
preserve a rigid immobility for fear of over- 
turning the little two-legged creature. She 
has never seen your resigned smile when 
the little two-legged creature, interrogated, 
sternly, "What are you doing to the good 
dog?" answers, with a wide, innocent stare: 
"Nothing. Only loving him, mama dear!" 

The general's daughter does not know the 
169 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

secret terms of self-imposed tasks, good dog, 
the pain that may lurk in the very rewards 
of rigid self-command. But we have lived 
together many years. We have grown older, 
too; and though our work is not quite done 
yet we may indulge now and then in a little 
introspection before the fire — meditate on the 
art of bringing up babies and on the perfect 
delight of writing tales where so many lives 
come and go at the cost of one which slips 
imperceptibly away. 



VI 



In the retrospect of a life which had, besides 
its preHminary stage of childhood and early 
youth, two distinct developments, and even 
two distinct elements, such as earth and 
water, for its successive scenes, a certain 
amount of naiveness is unavoidable. I am 
conscious of it in these pages. This remark 
is put forward in no apologetic spirit. As 
years go by and the number of pages grows 
steadily, the feeling grows upon one, too, that 
one can write only for friends. Then why 
should one put them to the necessity of 
protesting (as a friend would do) that no 
apology is necessary, or put, perchance, into 
their heads the doubt of one's discretion? 
So much as to the care due to those friends 
whom a word here, a line there, a fortunate 
page of just feeling in the right place, some 
happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, 
has drawn from the great multitude of fellow 
beings even as a fish is drawn from the depths 
of the sea. Fishing is notoriously (I am 

171 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

talking now of the deep sea) a matter of luck. 
As to one's enemies, they will take care of 
themselves. 

There is a gentleman, for instance, who, 
metaphorically speaking, jumps upon me with 
both feet. This image has no grace, but it is 
exceedingly apt to the occasion — to the sev- 
eral occasions. I don't know precisely how 
long he had been indulging in that intermit- 
tent exercise, whose seasons are ruled by the 
custom of the publishing trade. Somebody 
pointed him out (in printed shape, of course) 
to my attention some time ago, and straight- 
way I experienced a sort of reluctant affection 
for that robust man. He leaves not a shred 
of my substance untrodden: for the writer's 
substance is his writing; the rest of him is 
but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on 
uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the 
sentiment owned to is not a freak of affecta- 
tion or perversity. It has a deeper, and, I 
venture to think, a more estimable origin than 
the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, 
indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given 
(reluctantly) for a consideration, for several 
considerations. There is that robustness, for 
instance, so often the sign of good moral 
balance. That's a consideration. It is not, 

172 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

indeed, pleasant to be stamped upon, but the 
very thoroughness of the operation, implying 
not only a careful reading, but some real 
insight into work whose qualities and defects, 
whatever they may be, are not so much on 
the surface, is something to be thankful for in 
view of the fact that it may happen to one's 
work to be condemned without being read 
at all. This is the most fatuous adventure 
that can well happen to a writer venturing his 
soul among criticisms. It can do one no harm, 
of course, but it is disagreeable. It is dis- 
agreeable in the same way as discovering a 
three-card-trick man among a decent lot of 
folk in a third-class compartment. The open 
impudence of the whole transaction, appealing 
insidiously to the folly and credulity of man- 
kind, the brazen, shameless patter, proclaim- 
ing the fraud openly while insisting on the 
fairness of the game, give one a feeling of 
sickening disgust. The honest violence of a 
plain man playing a fair game fairly — even if 
he means to knock you over — may appear 
shocking, but it remains within the pale of 
decency. Damaging as it may be, it is in no 
sense offensive. One may well feel some 
regard for honesty, even if practised upon 
one's own vile body. But it is very obvious 

12 173 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

that an enemy of that sort will not be stayed 
by explanations or placated by apologies. 
Were I to advance the plea of youth in excuse 
of the naiveness to be found in these pages, 
he would be likely to say " Bosh!" in a column 
and a half of fierce print. Yet a writer is no 
older than his first published book, and, not- 
withstanding the vain appearances of decay 
which attend us in this transitory life, I stand 
here with the wreath of only fifteen short 
summers on my brow. 

With the remark, then, that at such tender 
age some naiveness of feeling and expression 
is excusable, I proceed to admit that, upon the 
whole, my previous state of existence was not 
a good equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I 
should not have used the word literary. That 
word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance 
with letters, a turn of mind, and a manner of 
feeling to which I dare lay no claim. I only 
love letters; but the love of letters does not 
make a literary man, any more than the love 
of the sea makes a seaman. And it is very 
possible, too, that I love the letters in the 
same way a literary man may love the sea he 
looks at from the shore — a scene of great 
endeavor and of great achievements changing 
the face of the world, the great open way to 

174 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

all sorts of undiscovered countries. No, per- 
haps I had better say that the life at sea — and 
I don't mean a mere taste of it, but a good 
broad span of years, something that really 
counts as real service — is not, upon the whole, 
a good equipment for a writing life. God for- 
bid, though, that I should be thought of as 
denying my masters of the quarter-deck. I 
am not capable of that sort of apostasy. I 
have confessed my attitude of piety toward 
their shades in three or four tales, and if any 
man on earth more than another needs to be 
true to himself as he hopes to be saved, it is 
certainly the writer of fiction. 

What I meant to say, simply, is that the 
quarter-deck training does not prepare one 
sufficiently for the reception of literary criti- 
cism. Only that, and no more. But this 
defect is not without gravity. If it be per- 
missible to twist, invert, adapt (and spoil) 
Mr. Anatole France's definition of a good 
critic, then let us say that the good author 
is he who contemplates without marked joy 
or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul 
among criticisms. Far be from me the in- 
tention to mislead an attentive public into the 
belief that there is no criticism at sea. That 
would be dishonest , and even impolite . E very- 

175 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

thing can be found at sea, according to the 
spirit of your quest — strife, peace, romance, 
naturaHsm of the most pronounced kind, 
ideals, boredom, disgust, inspiration — and 
every conceivable opportunity, including the 
opportunity to make a fool of yourself, 
exactly as in the pursuit of literature. But 
the quarter-deck criticism is somewhat differ- 
ent from literary criticism. This much they 
have in common, that before the one and 
the other the answering back, as a general 
rule, does not pay. 

Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even 
appreciation — I tell you everything is to be 
found on salt water — criticism generally im- 
promptu, and always viva voce, which is the 
outward, obvious difference from the literary 
operation of that kind, with consequent fresh- 
ness and vigor which may be lacking in the 
printed word. With appreciation, which 
comes at the end, when the critic and the 
criticized are about to part, it is otherwise. 
The sea appreciation of one's humble talents 
has the permanency of the written word, 
seldom the charm of variety, is formal in its 
phrasing. There the literary master has the 
superiority, though he, too, can in effect but 
say — and often says it in the very phrase — 

176 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"I can highly recommend." Only usually he 
uses the word "We," there being some occult 
virtue in the first person plural which makes 
it specially fit for critical and royal declara- 
tions. I have a small handful of these sea 
appreciations, signed by various masters, 
yellowing slowly in my writing-table's left- 
hand drawer, rustling under my reverent 
touch, like a handful of dry leaves plucked 
for a tender memento from the tree of knowl- 
edge. Strange! It seems that it is for these 
few bits of paper, headed by the names of a 
few ships and signed by the names of a few 
Scots and English shipmasters, that I have 
faced the astonished indignations, the mock- 
eries, and the reproaches of a sort hard to 
bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been 
charged with the want of patriotism, the want 
of sense, and the want of heart, too; that I 
went through agonies of self-conflict and shed 
secret tears not a few, and had the beauties 
of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have 
been called an "incorrigible Don Quixote," 
in allusion to the book-born madness of the 
knight. For that spoil! They rustle, those 
bits of paper — some dozen of them in all. 
In that faint, ghostly sound there live the 
memories of twenty years, the voices of 

177 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

rough men now no more, the strong voice of 
the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a 
mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, 
which must have somehow reached my inland 
cradle and entered my unconscious ear, like 
that formula of Mohammedan faith the 
Mussulman father whispers into the ear of 
his new-bom infant, making him one of the 
faithful almost with his first breath. I do 
not know whether I have been a good seaman, 
but I know I have been a very faithful one. 
And, after all, there is that handful of "char- 
acters" from various ships to prove that all 
these years have not been altogether a dream. 
There they are, brief, and monotonous in 
tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me 
as any inspired page to be found in literature. 
But then, you see, I have been called romantic. 
Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I 
seem to remember that I have been called a 
realist, also. And as that charge, too, can 
be made out, let us try to live up to it, at 
whatever cost, for a change. With this end in 
view, I will confide to you coyly, and only be- 
cause there is no one about to see my blushes by 
the light of the midnight lamp, that these sug- 
gestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation, one 
and all, contain the words "strictly sober." 

178 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's 
very gratifying, to be sure"? Well, yes, it 
is gratifying — thank you. It is at least as 
gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified 
romantic, though such certificates would not 
qualify one for the secretaryship of a temper- 
ance association or for the post of official trou- 
badour to sonie lordly democratic institution 
such as the London County Council, for in- 
stance. The above prosaic reflection is put 
down here only in order to prove the general 
sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. 
I make a point of it because a couple of years 
ago, a certain short story of mine being pub- 
lished in a French translation, a Parisian critic 
— I am almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn 
in the Gil-Bias — giving me a short notice, 
simimed up his rapid impression of the 
writer's quality in the words un puissant 
reveur. So be it! Who would cavil at the 
words of a friendly reader? Yet perhaps 
not such an unconditional dreamer as all 
that. I will make bold to say that neither 
at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense 
of responsibility. There is more than one 
sort of intoxication. Even before the most 
seductive reveries I have remained mindful 
of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism 

179 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

of sentiment, in which alone the naked form 
of truth, such as one conceives it, such as 
one feels it, can be rendered without shame. 
It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that 
comes out through the strength of wine. I 
have tried to be a sober worker all my life — 
all my two lives. I did so from taste, no 
doubt, having an instinctive horror of losing 
my sense of full self-possession, but also from 
artistic conviction. Yet there are so many 
pitfalls on each side of the true path that, 
having gone some way, and feeling a little 
battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveler 
will from the mere daily difhculties of the 
march, I ask myself whether I have kept 
always, always faithful to that sobriety where- 
in there is power and truth and peace. 

As to my sea sobriety, that is quite prop- 
erly certified under the sign-manual of sev- 
eral trustworthy shipmasters of some stand- 
ing in their time. I seem to hear your polite 
murmur that "Surely this might have been 
taken for granted." Well, no. It might not 
have been. That august academical body, 
the Marine Department of the Board of 
Trade, takes nothing for granted in the 
granting of its learned degrees. By its regu- 
lations issued under the first Merchant Ship- 

i8o 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ping Act, the very word sober must be writ- 
ten, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of 
the most enthusiastic appreciation will avail 
you nothing. The door of the examination- 
rooms shall remain closed to your tears and 
entreaties. The most fanatical advocate of 
temperance could not be more pitilessly 
fierce in his rectitude than the Marine De- 
partment of the Board of Trade. As I have 
been face to face at various times with all 
the examiners of the Port of London in my 
generation, there can be no doubt as to the 
force and the continuity of my abstemious- 
ness. Three of them were examiners in sea- 
manship, and it was my fate to be delivered 
into the hands of each of them at proper 
intervals of sea service. The first of all, tall, 
spare, with a perfectly white head and mus- 
tache, a quiet, kindly manner, and an air of 
benign intelligence, must, I am forced to 
conclude, have been unfavorably impressed 
by something in my appearance. His old, 
thin hands loosely clasped resting on his 
crossed legs, he began by an elementary ques- 
tion, in a mild voice, and went on, went on. 
... It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I 
been a strange microbe with potentialities 
of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service 

i8i 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I could not have been submitted to a more 
microscopic examination. Greatly reassured 
by his apparent benevolence, I had been at 
first very alert in my answers. But at 
length the feeling of my brain getting addled 
crept upon me. And still the passionless 
process went on, with a sense of untold ages 
having been spent already on mere pre- 
liminaries. Then I got frightened. I was 
not frightened of being plucked; that event- 
uality did not even present itself to my mind. 
It was something much more serious and 
weird. "This ancient person," I said to 
myself, terrified, "is so near his grave that 
he must have lost all notion of time. He is 
considering this examination in terms of 
eternity. It is all very well for him. His 
race is run. But I may find myself coming 
out of this room into the world of men a 
stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very 
landlady, even were I able after this endless 
experience to remember the way to my hired 
home." This statement is not so much of a 
verbal exaggeration as may be supposed. 
Some very queer thoughts passed through 
my head while I was considering my answers ; 
thoughts which had nothing to do with sea- 
manship, nor yet with anything reasonable 

182 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

known to this earth, I verily believe that 
at times I was light-headed in a sort of lan- 
guid way. At last there fell a silence, and 
that, too, seemed to last for ages, while, 
bending over his desk, the examiner wrote 
out my pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. 
He extended the scrap of paper to me with- 
out a word, inclined his white head gravely 
to my parting bow. . . . 

When I got out of the room I felt limply 
fiat, like a squeezed lemon, and the door- 
keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to 
get my hat and tip him a shilling, said: 

"Well! I thought you were never coming 
out." 

"How long have I been in there?" I asked, 
faintly. 

He pulled out his watch. 

"He kept you, sir, just under three hours. 
I don't think this ever happened with any 
of the gentlemen before." 

It was only when I got out of the building 
that I began to walk on air. And the human 
animal being averse from change and timid 
before the unknown, I said to myself that 
I really would not mind being examined by 
the same man on a future occasion. But 
when the time of ordeal came round again 

183 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

the doorkeeper let me into another room, 
with the now famihar paraphernaha of models 
of ships and tackle, a board for signals on 
the wall, a big, long table covered with official 
forms and having an unrigged mast fixed 
to the edge. The solitary tenant was un- 
known to me by sight, though not by repu- 
tation, which was simply execrable. Short 
and sturdy, as far as I could judge, clad in 
an old brown morning-suit, he sat leaning 
on his elbow, his hand shading his eyes, and 
half averted from the chair I was to occupy 
on the other side of the table. He was mo- 
tionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with 
something mournful, too, in the pose, like 
that statue of Giugliano (I think) de Medici 
shading his face on the tomb by Michael 
Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far 
from being beautiful. He began by trying to 
make me talk nonsense. But I had been 
warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted 
him with great assurance. After a while he 
left off. So far good. But his immobility, 
the thick elbow on the table, the abrupt, 
unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face 
grew more and more impressive. He kept 
inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, 
placing me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, 

184 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

under certain conditions of weather, season, 
locality, etc. — all very clear and precise — 
ordered me to execute a certain manceuver. 
Before I was half through with it he did some 
material damage to the ship. Directly I had 
grappled with the difficulty he caused another 
to present itself, and when that, too, was 
met he stuck another ship before me, creat- 
ing a very dangerous situation. I felt slight- 
ly outraged by this ingenuity in piling trouble 
upon a man. 

"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I 
suggested, mildly. "I could have seen that 
ship before." 

He never stirred the least bit. 

"No, you couldn't. The weather's thick." 

"Oh! I didn't know," I apologized, 
blankly. 

I suppose that after all I managed to stave 
off the smash with sufficient approach to 
verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went 
on. You must understand that the scheme 
of the test he was applying to me was, I 
gathered, a homeward passage — the sort of 
passage I would not wish to my bitterest 
enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to 
labor under a most comprehensive curse. 
It's no use enlarging on these never-ending 

185 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

misfortunes; suffice it to say that long be- 
fore the end I would have welcomed with 
gratitude an opportunity to exchange into 
the Flying Dutchman. Finally he shoved 
me into the North Sea (I suppose) and pro- 
vided me with a lee shore with outlying sand- 
banks — the Dutch coast, presumably. Dis- 
tance, eight miles. The evidence of such 
implacable animosity deprived me of speech 
for quite half a minute. 

"Well," he said — for our pace had been 
very smart, indeed, till then. 

"I will have to think a little, sir." 

"Doesn't look as if there were much time 
to think," he muttered, sardonically, from 
under his hand. 

"No, sir," I said, with some warmth. 
"Not on board a ship, I could see. But so 
many accidents have happened that I really 
can't remember what there's left for me to 
work with." 

Still half averted, and with his eyes con- 
cealed, he made unexpectedly a grunting 
remark. 

"You've done very well." 

"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" 
I asked. 

"Yes." 

i86 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I prepared myself then, as a last hope for 
the ship, to let them both go in the most 
effectual manner, when his infernal system 
of testing resourcefulness came into play 
again. 

"But there's only one cable. You've lost 
the other." 

It was exasperating. 

"Then I would back them, if I could, and 
tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end 
of the chain before letting go, and if she 
parted from that, which is quite likely, I 
would just do nothing. She would have 
to go." 

"Nothing more to do, eh?" 

"No, sir. I could do no more." 

He gave a bitter half -laugh. 

"You could always say your prayers." 

He got up, stretched himself, and yawned 
slightly. It was a sallow, strong, tmamiable 
face. He put me, in a surly, bored fashion, 
through the usual questions as to lights and 
signals, and I escaped from the room thank- 
fully — passed! Forty minutes! And again 
I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so 
many good men had lost their heads because, 
I suppose, they were not resourceful enough 
to save them. And in my heart of hearts 

187 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I had no objection to meeting that examiner 
once more when the third and last ordeal 
became due in another year or so. I even 
hoped I should. I knew the worst of him 
now, and forty minutes is not an unreason- 
able time. Yes, I distinctly hoped . . . 

But not a bit of it. When I presented my- 
self to be examined for master the examiner 
who received me was short, plump, with a 
round, soft face in gray, fluffy whiskers, and 
fresh, loquacious lips. 

He commenced operations with an easy- 
going "Let's see. H'm. Suppose you tell 
me all you know of charter-parties." He kept 
it up in that style all through, wandering 
off in the shape of comment into bits out of 
his own life, then pulling himself up short and 
returning to the business in hand. It was 
very interesting. "What's your idea of a 
jury-rudder now?" he queried, suddenly, at 
the end of an instructive anecdote bearing 
upon a point of stowage. 

I warned him that I had no experience of 
a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two classical 
examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. 
In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder 
he had invented himself years before, when 
in command of a three-thousand-ton steamer. 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance 
imaginable. "May be of use to you some 
day," he concluded. "You will go into steam 
presently. Everybody goes into steam." 

There he was wrong. I never went into 
steam — not really. If I only live long enough 
I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead bar- 
barism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the 
only seaman of the dark ages who had never 
gone into steam — not really. 

Before the examination was over he im- 
parted to me a few interesting details of the 
transport service in the time of the Crimean 
War. 

"The use of wire rigging became general 
about that time, too," he observed. "I was 
a very young master then. That was before 
you were born." 

"Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857." 

"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if 
to himself, adding in a louder tone that his 
ship happened then to be in the Gulf of 
Bengal, employed under a government charter. 

Clearly the transport service had been the 
making of this examiner, who so unexpectedly 
had given me an insight into his existence, 
awakening in me the sense of the continuity 
of that sea life into which I had stepped from 
13 189 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

outside ; giving a touch of human intimacy to 
the machinery of official relations. I felt 
adopted. His experience was for me, too, as 
though he had been an ancestor. 

Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) 
with laborious care on the slip of blue paper, 
he remarked: 

"You are of Polish extraction." 

"Born there, sir." 

He laid down the pen and leaned back to 
look at me as it were for the first time. 

* * Not many of your nationality in our service, 
I should think. I never remember meeting 
one either before or after I left the sea. Don't 
remember ever hearing of one. An inland 
people, aren't you?" 

I said yes — very much so. We were remote 
from the sea not only by situation, but also 
from a complete absence of indirect associa- 
tion, not being a commercial nation at all, 
but purely agricultural. He made then the 
quaint reflection that it was "a long way for 
me to come out to begin a sea life"; as if 
sea life were not precisely a life in which one 
goes a long way from home. 

I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could 
have found a ship much nearer my native 
place, but I had thought to myself that if I 

190 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

was to be a seaman, then I would be a British 
seaman and no other. It was a matter of 
dehberate choice. 

He nodded shghtly at that; and, as he kept 
on looking at me interrogatively, I enlarged 
a little, confessing that I had spent a little 
time on the way in the Mediterranean and in 
the West Indies. I did not want to present 
myself to the British Merchant Service in an 
altogether green state. It was no use telling 
him that my mysterious vocation was so 
strong that my very wild oats had to be sown 
at sea. It was the exact truth, but he would 
not have understood the somewhat excep- 
tional psychology of my sea-going, I fear. 

"I suppose you've never come across one 
of your countrymen at sea. Have you, now?" 

I admitted I never had. The examiner 
had given himself up to the spirit of gossiping 
idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to 
leave that room. Not in the least. The era 
of examinations was over. I would never 
again see that friendly man who was a pro- 
fessional ancestor, a sort of grandfather in the 
craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dis- 
missed me, and of that there was no sign. 
As he remained silent, looking at me, I 

added : 

191 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

"But I have heard of one, some years ago. 
He seems to have been a boy serving his 
time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not 
mistaken." 

"What was his name?" 

I told him. 

"How did you say that?" he asked, pucker- 
ing up his eyes at the uncouth sound. 

I repeated the name very distinctly. 

"How do you spell it?" 

I told him. He moved his head at the 
impracticable nature of that name, and ob- 
served : 

"It's quite as long as your own — isn't it?" 

There was no hurry. I had passed for 
master, and I had all the rest of my life 
before me to make the best of it. That 
seemed a long time. I went leisurely through 
a small mental calculation, and said: 

"Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir." 

"Is it?" The examiner pushed the signed 
blue slip across the table to me, and rose 
from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very 
abrupt ending of our relations, and I felt 
almost sorry to part from that excellent man, 
who was master of a ship before the whisper 
of the sea had reached my cradle. He offered 
me his hand and wished me well. He even 

192 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

made a few steps toward the door with me, 
and ended with good-natured advice. 

"I don't know what may be your plans, 
but you ought to go into steam. When a 
man has got his master's certificate it's the 
proper time. If I were you I would go into 
steam." 

I thanked him, and shut the door behind 
me definitely on the era of examinations. 
But that time I did not walk on air, as on 
the first two occasions. I walked across the 
hill of many beheadings with measured steps. 
It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now 
a British master mariner beyond a doubt. It 
was not that I had an exaggerated sense of 
that very modest achievement, with which, 
however, luck, opportunity, or any extrane- 
ous influence could have had nothing to do. 
That fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, 
had for me a certain ideal significance. It 
was an answer to certain outspoken scepti- 
cism and even to some not very kind as- 
persions. I had vindicated myself from what 
had been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or 
a fantastic caprice. I don't mean to say 
that a whole country had been convulsed by 
my desire to go to sea. But for a boy be- 
tween fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough, 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

in all conscience, the commotion of his 
little world had seemed a very considerable 
thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly 
enough, the echoes of it linger to this day. 
I catch myself in hours of solitude and 
retrospect meeting arguments and charges 
made thirty-five years ago by voices now 
forever still; finding things to say that an 
assailed boy could not have found, simply 
because of the mysteriousness of his impulses 
to himself. I understood no more than the 
people who called upon me to explain my- 
self. There was no precedent. I verily be- 
lieve mine was the only case of a boy of my 
nationality and antecedents taking a, so to 
speak, standing jtimp out of his racial sur- 
roundings and associations. For you must 
understand that there was no idea of any 
sort of "career" in my call. Of Russia or 
Germany there could be no question. The 
nationality, the antecedents, made it impos- 
sible. The feeling against the Austrian ser- 
vice was not so strong, and I dare say there 
would have been no difficulty in finding my 
way into the Naval School at Pola. It would 
have meant six months' extra grinding at 
German, perhaps; but I was not past the age 
of admission, and in other respects I was well 

194 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly- 
was thought of — but not by me. I must 
admit that in that respect my negative was 
accepted at once. That order of feeling was 
comprehensible enough to the most inimical 
of my critics. I was not called upon to offer 
explanations; but the truth is that what I 
had in view was not a naval career, but the 
sea. There seemed no way open to it but 
through France. I had the language, at any 
rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is 
with France that Poland has most connec- 
tion. There were some facilities for having 
me a little looked after, at first. Letters 
were being written, answers were being re- 
ceived, arrangements were being made for 
my departure for Marseilles, where an ex- 
cellent fellow called Solary, got at in a round- 
about fashion through various French channels, 
had promised good-naturedly to put le jeune 
homme in the way of getting a decent ship 
for his first start if he really wanted a taste 
of ce metier de chien. 

I watched all these preparations grate- 
fully, and kept my own counsel. But what I 
told the last of my examiners was perfectly 
true. Already the determined resolve that 
"if a seaman, then an English seaman" was 

IPS 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

formulated in my head, though, of course, 
in the Pohsh language. I did not know six 
words of English, and I was astute enough 
to understand that it was much better to 
say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was 
already looked upon as partly insane, at 
least by the more distant acquaintances. 
The principal thing was to get away. I put 
my trust in the good-natured Solary's very 
civil letter to my uncle, though I was shocked 
a little by the phrase about the metier de cliien. 
This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him 
in the flesh, turned out a quite young man, 
very good-looking, with a fine black, short 
beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry 
black eyes. He was as jovial and good- 
natured as any boy could desire. I was still 
asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the 
quays of the old port, after the fatigues of 
the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when 
he burst in, flinging the shutters open to the 
sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously 
for lying abed. How pleasantly he startled 
me by his noisy objurgations to be up and off 
instantly for a "three years' campaign in the 
South Seas " ! O magic words ! ' * U^ie campagne 
de trois ans dans les mers du sud'' — that is the 
French for a three years ' deep-water voyage. 

196 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

He gave me a delightful waking, and his 
friendliness was unwearied; but I fear he 
did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me 
in a very solemn spirit. He had been at sea 
himself, but had left off at the age of twenty- 
five, finding he could earn his living on shore 
in a much more agreeable manner. He was 
related to an incredible number of Marseilles 
well-to-do families of a certain class. One of 
his uncles was a ship-broker of good standing, 
with a large connection among English ships; 
other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, 
owned sail-lofts, sold chains and anchors, were 
master-stevedores, calkers, shipwrights. His 
grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a 
kind, the Syndic of the Pilots. I made ac- 
quaintances among these people, but mainly 
among the pilots. The very first whole day 
I ever spent on salt water was by invitation, 
in a big half -decked pilot-boat, cruising under 
close reefs on the lookout, in misty, blowing 
weather, for the sails of ships and the smoke 
of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim 
and tall Planier lighthouse cutting the line of 
the wind-swept horizon with a white perpen- 
dicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, 
these sturdy Provencal seamen. Under the 
general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin 

197 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I was made the guest of the corporation of 
pilots, and had the freedom of their boats 
night or day. And many a day and a night, 
too, did I spend cruising with these rough, 
kindly men, under whose auspices my in- 
timacy with the sea began. Many a time 
"the little friend of Baptistin " had the hooded 
cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over 
him by their honest hands while dodging at 
night under the lee of Chateau d'lf on the 
watch for the lights of ships. Their sea- 
tanned faces, whiskered or shaved, lean or 
full, with the intent, wrinkled sea eyes of the 
pilot breed, and here and there a thin gold 
hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over 
my sea infancy. The first operation of sea- 
manship I had an opportunity of observing 
was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, 
in all states of the weather. They gave it to 
me to the full. And I have been invited to 
sit in more than one tall, dark house of the 
old town at their hospitable board, had the 
bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate by 
their high- voiced, broad-browed wives, talked 
to their daughters — thick-set girls, with pure 
profiles, glorious masses of black hair arranged 
with complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly 
white teeth. 

198 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

I had also other acquaintances of quite a 
different sort. One of them, Madame Del- 
estang, an imperious, handsome lady in a 
statuesque style, would carry me off now and 
then on the front seat of her carriage to the 
Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She 
belonged to one of the old aristocratic families 
in the south. In her haughty weariness she 
used to make me think of Lady Dedlock in 
Dickens's Bleak House, a work of the master 
for which I have such an admiration, or rather 
such an intense and unreasoning affection, 
dating from the days of my childhood, that 
its very weaknesses are more precious to me 
than the strength of other men's work. I 
have read it innumerable times, both in 
Polish and in English ; I have read it only the 
other day, and, by a not very surprising in- 
version, the Lady Dedlock of the book re- 
minded me strongly of the "belle Madame 
Delestang.'' 

Her husband (as I sat facing them both), 
with his thin, bony nose and a perfectly 
bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped to- 
gether, as it were, by short, formal side whisk- 
ers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's 
"grand air" and courtly solemnity. He be- 
longed to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

a banker, with whom a modest credit had 
been opened for my needs. He was such an 
ardent — no, such a frozen-up, mummified 
RoyaUst that he used in current conversation 
turns of speech contemporary, I should say, 
with the good Henri Quatre; and when talk- 
ing of money matters, reckoned not in francs, 
like the common, godless herd of post-Revo- 
lutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and 
forgotten ecus — ecus of all money units in 
the world! — as though Louis Quatorze were 
still promenading in royal splendor the gar- 
dens of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert 
busy with the direction of maritime affairs. 
You must admit that in a banker of the nine- 
teenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. 
Luckily, in the counting-house (it occupied 
part of the ground floor of the Delestang 
town residence, in a silent, shady street) the 
accounts were kept in modem money, so that 
I never had any difficulty in making my 
wants known to the grave, low-voiced, dec- 
orous. Legitimist (I suppose) clerks, sitting 
in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred win- 
dows behind the somber, ancient counters, 
beneath lofty ceilings with heavily molded 
cornices. I always felt, on going out, as 
though I had been in the temple of some 

200 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

very dignified but completely temporal re- 
ligion. And it was generally on these occa- 
sions that under the great carriage gateway 
Lady Ded — I mean Madame Delestang, 
catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon 
me with an amiable imperiousness to the side 
of the carriage, and suggest with an air of 
amused nonchalance, " Venez done faire un 
tour avec nous'^ to which the husband would 
add an encouraging " Cest ca. Allons, montez, 
jeune homme.'" He questioned me some- 
times, significantly but with perfect tact and 
delicacy, as to the way I employed my time, 
and never failed to express the hope that I 
wrote regularly to my "honored uncle." I 
made no secret of the way I employed my 
time, and I rather fancy that my artless 
tales of the pilots and so on entertained 
Madame Delestang so far as that ineffable 
woman could be entertained by the prattle 
of a youngster very full of his new experience 
among strange men and strange sensations. 
She expressed no opinions, and talked to me 
very little; yet her portrait hangs in the gal- 
lery of my intimate memories, fixed there 
by a short and fleeting episode. One day, 
after putting me down at the comer of a 
street, she offered m-e her hand, and detained 

20Z 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

me, by a slight pressure, for a moment. While 
the husband sat motionless and looking 
straight before him, she leaned forward in 
the carriage to say, with just a shade of warn- 
ing in her leisurely tone: " II faut, cependant, 
faire attention a ne pas gater sa vie." I had 
never seen her face so close to mine before. 
She made my heart beat and caused me to 
remain thoughtful for a whole evening. Cer- 
tainly one must, after all, take care not to 
spoil one's life. But she did not know — 
nobody could know— how impossible that 
danger seemed to me. 



VII 



Can the transports of first love be calmed, 
checked, turned to a cold suspicion of the 
future by a grave quotation from a work on 
political economy? I ask — is it conceivable? 
Is it possible? Would it be right? With my 
feet on the very shores of the sea and about 
to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could 
a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's 
life mean to my youthful passion? It was 
the most unexpected and the last, too, of the 
many warnings I had received. It sounded 
to me very bizarre — and, uttered as it was in 
the very presence of my enchantress, like the 
voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But 
I was not so callous or so stupid as not to 
recognize there also the voice of kindness. 
And then the vagueness of the warning — 
because what can be the meaning of the 
phrase: to spoil one's life? — arrested one's 
attention by its air of wise profundity. At 
any rate, as I have said before, the words of 
la belle Madame Delestang made me thought- 

203 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

ful for a whole evening. I tried to under- 
stand and tried in vain, not having any notion 
of Hfe as an enterprise that could be mis- 
managed. But I left off being thoughtful 
shortly before midnight, at which hour, 
haunted by no ghosts of the past and by no 
visions of the future, I walked down the quay 
of the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my 
friends. I knew where she would be waiting 
for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind 
the fort at the entrance of the harbor. The 
deserted quays looked very white and dry in 
the moonlight, and as if frost-bound in the 
sharp air of that December night. A prowler 
or two slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house 
guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced 
close under the bowsprits of the long row of 
ships moored bows on opposite the long, 
slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall 
houses that seemed to be one immense 
abandoned building with innumerable win- 
dows shuttered closely. Only here and there 
a small, dingy cafe for sailors cast a yellow 
gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones. 
Passing by, one heard a deep murmur of 
voices inside — nothing more. How quiet 
everything was at the end of the quays on the 
last night on which I went out for a service 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

cruise as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! 
Not a footstep, except my own, not a sigh, 
not a whispering echo of the usual revelry 
going on in the narrow, unspeakable lanes of 
the Old Town reached my ear — and suddenly, 
with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass, 
the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey 
swung round the corner of the dead wall 
which faces across the paved road the charac- 
teristic angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. 
Three horses trotted abreast, with the clatter 
of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow, 
uproarious machine jolted violently behind 
them, fantastic, Hghted up, perfectly empty, 
and with the driver apparently asleep on his 
swaying perch above that amazing racket. 
I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. 
It was a stunning experience. Then after 
staggering on a few paces in the shadow of the 
fort, casting a darkness more intense than 
that of a clouded night upon the canal, I saw 
the tiny light of a lantern standing on the 
quay, and became aware of muffled figures 
making toward it from various directions. 
Pilots of the Third Company hastening to 
embark. Too sleepy to be talkative, they 
step on board in silence. But a few low 
grunts and an enormous yawn are heard. 
14 205 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

Somebody even ejaculates: ''Ahl Coquin de 
sort!" and sighs wearily at his hard fate. 

The patron of the Third Company (there 
were five companies of pilots at that time, I 
believe) is the brother-in-law of my friend 
Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep- 
chested man of forty, with a keen, frank 
glance which always seeks your eyes. He 
greets me by a low, hearty ''He, rami. Com- 
ment va?" With his clipped mustache and 
massive open face, energetic and at the same 
time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen 
of the southerner of the calm type. For 
there is such a type in which the volatile 
southern passion is transmuted into solid 
force. He is fair, but no one could mistake 
him for a man of the north even by the dim 
gleam of the lantern standing on the quay. 
He is worth a dozen of your ordinary Nor- 
mans or Bretons, but then, in the whole 
immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, 
you could not find half a dozen men of his 
stamp. 

Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his 
watch from under a thick jacket and bends 
his head over it in the light cast into the boat. 
Time's up. His pleasant voice commands, 
in a quiet undertone, "Larguez." A suddenly 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

projected arm snatches the lantern off the 
quay — and, warped along by a line at first, 
then with the regular tug of four heayy sweeps 
in the bow, the big half-decked boat full of 
men glides out of the black, breathless shadow 
of the fort. The open water of the avant-port 
glitters under the moon as if sown over with 
millions of sequins, and the long white break- 
water shines like a thick bar of solid silver. 
With a quick rattle of blocks and one single 
silky swish, the sail is filled by a little breeze 
keen enough to have come straight down from 
the frozen moon, and the boat, after the clatter 
of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at 
rest, surrounded by a mysterious whispering 
so faint and unearthly that it may be the 
rustling of the brilliant, overpowering moon- 
rays breaking like a rain-shower upon the 
hard, smooth, shadowless sea. 

I may well remember that last night spent 
with the pilots of the Third Company. I 
have known the spell of moonlight since, 
on various seas and coasts — coasts of forests, 
of rocks, of sand dunes — but no magic so 
perfect in its revelation of unsuspected char- 
acter, as though one were allowed to look 
upon the mystic nature of material things. 
For hours I suppose no word was spoken in 

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A PERSONAL RECORD 

that boat. The pilots, seated in two rows 
facing each other, dozed, with their arms 
folded and their chins resting upon their 
breasts. They displayed a great variety of 
caps: cloth, wool, leather, peaks, ear-flaps, 
tassels, with a picturesque round heret or 
two pulled down over the brows; and one 
grandfather, with a shaved, bony face and a 
great beak of a nose, had a cloak with a hood 
which made him look in our midst like a 
cowled monk being carried off goodness knows 
where by that silent company of seamen — 
quiet enough to be dead, 

My fingers itched for the tiller, and in due 
course my friend, the patron, surrendered it 
to me in the same spirit in which the family 
coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an 
easy bit of road. There was a great solitude 
around us; the islets ahead, Monte Cristo 
and the Chateau d'lf in full light, seemed 
to float toward us — so steady, so impercep- 
tible was the progress of our boat. "Keep 
her in the furrow of the moon," the patron 
directed me, in a quiet murmur, sitting down 
ponderously in the stem-sheets and reaching 
for his pipe. 

The pilot station in weather like this was 
only a mile or two to the westward of the 

208 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

islets; and presently, as we approached the 
spot, the boat we were going to relieve swam 
into our view suddenly, on her way home, 
cutting black and sinister into the wake of 
the moon under a sable wing, while to them 
our sail must have been a vision of white 
and dazzling radiance. Without altering the 
course a hair's breadth we slipped by each 
other within an oar's length. A drawling, 
sardonic hail came out of her. Instantly, as 
if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their 
feet in a body. An incredible babel of ban- 
tering shouts burst out, a jocular, passionate, 
voluble chatter, which lasted till the boats 
were stem to stem, theirs all bright now, and, 
with a shining sail to our eyes, we turned all 
black to their vision, and drew away from 
them under a sable wing. That extraordi- 
nary uproar died away almost as suddenly as 
it had begim; first one had enough of it and 
sat down, then another, then three or four 
together; and when all had left off with mut- 
ters and growling half-laughs the sound of 
hearty chuckling became audible, persistent, 
unnoticed. The cowled grandfather was very 
much entertained somewhere within his hood. 
He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, 
neither had he moved the least bit. He had 

309 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

remained quietly in his place against the foot 
of the mast. I had been given to under- 
stand long before that he had the rating of 
a second-class able seaman {matelot leger) in 
the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the 
conquest of Algeria in the year of grace 1830. 
And, indeed, I had seen and examined one 
of the buttons of his old brown, patched coat, 
the only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, 
flat and thin, with the words Equipages de 
ligne engraved on it. That sort of button, 
I believe, went out with the last of the 
French Bourbons. "I preserved it from the 
time of my navy service," he explained, 
nodding rapidly his frail, vulture-like head. 
It was not very likely that he had picked up 
that relic in the street. He looked certainly 
old enough to have fought at Trafalgar — or, at 
any rate, to have played his little part there as 
a powder-monkey. Shortly after we had been 
introduced he had informed me in a Franco- 
Provencal jargon, mumbling tremtilously with 
his toothless jaws, that when he was a 
"shaver no higher than that" he had seen 
the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. 
It was at night, he narrated vaguely, with- 
out animation, at a spot between Frejus and 
Antibes, in the open country. A big fire had 

210 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

been lit at the side of the cross-roads. The 
population from several villages had col- 
lected there, old and young — down to the 
very children in arms, because the women 
had refused to stay at home. Tall soldiers 
wearing high, hairy caps stood in a circle, 
facing the people silently, and their stem 
eyes and big mustaches were enough to 
make everybody keep at a distance. He, 
"being an impudent little shaver," wriggled 
out of the crowd, creeping on his hands and 
knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' 
legs, and peeping through discovered, stand- 
ing perfectly still in the light of the fire, "a 
little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat, but- 
toned up in a long straight coat, with a big, 
pale face inclined on one shoulder, looking 
something like a priest. His hands were 
clasped behind his back. ... It appears that 
this was the Emperor," the ancient com- 
mented, with a faint sigh. He was staring 
from the ground with all his might, when 
"my poor father," who had been searching 
for his boy frantically everywhere, pounced 
upon him and hauled him away by the ear. 
The tale seems an authentic recollection. 
He related it to me many times, using the 
very same words. The grandfather honored 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

me by a special and somewhat embarrassing 
predilection. Extremes touch. He was the 
oldest member by a long way in that com- 
pany, and I was, if I may say so, its tem- 
porarily adopted baby. He had been a pilot 
longer than any man in the boat could re- 
member; thirty — forty years. He did not 
seem certain himself, but it could be found 
out, he suggested, in the archives of the 
Pilot-office. He had been pensioned off years 
before, but he went out from force of habit; 
and, as my friend the patron of the company 
once confided to me in a whisper, "the old 
chap did no harm. He was not in the way." 
They treated him with rough deference. 
One and another would address some insig- 
nificant remark to him now and again, but 
nobody really took any notice of what he 
had to say. He had survived his strength, 
his usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore 
long, green, worsted stockings pulled up 
above the knee over his trousers, a sort of 
woolen nightcap on his hairless cranium, 
and wooden clogs on his feet. Without his 
hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half 
a dozen hands would be extended to help 
him on board, but afterward he was left 
pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course 

212 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

he never did any work, except, perhaps, to 
cast off some rope when hailed, ''He, VAn- 
cien ! let go the halyards there, at your hand " 
— or some such request of an easy kind. 

No one took notice in any way of the 
chuckling within the shadow of the hood. 
He kept it up for a long time with intense 
enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved in- 
tact the innocence of mind which is easily 
amused. But when his hilarity had ex- 
hausted itself, he made a professional remark 
in a self-assertive but quavering voice: 

"Can't expect much work on a night like 
this." 

No one took it up. It was a mere truism. 
Nothing under canvas could be expected to 
make a port on such an idle night of dreamy 
splendor and spiritual stillness. We would 
have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our 
station within the appointed bearings, and, 
unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the 
dawn, we would land before sunrise on a 
small islet that, within two miles of us, shone 
like a lump of frozen moonlight, to "break a 
crust and take a pull at the wine bottle." I 
was familiar with the procedure. The stout 
boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her 
buoyant, capable side against the very rock 

213 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

— such is the perfectly smooth amenity of 
the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The 
crust broken and the mouthful of wine 
swallowed — it was literally no more than that 
with this abstemious race — the pilots would 
pass the time stamping their feet on the slabs 
of sea-salted stone and blowing into their 
nipped fingers. One or two misanthropists 
would sit apart, perched on boulders like 
manlike sea -fowl of solitary habits; the 
sociably disposed would gossip scandalously 
in little gesticulating knots; and there would 
be perpetually one or another of my hosts 
taking aim at the empty horizon with the 
long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, 
murderous-looking piece of collective prop- 
erty, everlastingly changing hands with bran- 
dishing and leveling movements. Then about 
noon (it was a short turn of duty — the long 
turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boat- 
ful of pilots would relieve us — and we should 
steer for the old Phoenician port, dominated, 
watched over from the ridge of a dust-gray, 
arid hill by the red-and-white striped pile 
of the Notre Dame de la Garde. 

All this came to pass as I had foreseen 
in the fullness of my very recent experience. 
But also something not foreseen by me did 

214 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

happen, something which causes me to re- 
member my last outing with the pilots. It 
was on this occasion that my hand touched, 
for the first time, the side of an English ship. 

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, 
only the steady little draught got a more 
keen edge on it as the eastern sky became 
bright and glassy with a clean, colorless light. 
It was while we were all ashore on the islet 
that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, 
a black speck like an insect po'^ed on the hard 
edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to 
her water-line and came on steadily, a slim 
hull with a long streak of smoke slanting away 
from the rising sun. We embarked in a 
hurry, and headed the boat out for our prey, 
but we hardly moved three miles an hour. 

She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of 
a type that is to be met on the sea no more — 
black hull, with low, white superstructures, 
powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot 
of yards on the fore; two hands at her enor- 
mous wheel — steam steering-gear was not a 
matter of course in these days — and with 
them on the bridge three others, bulky in 
thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, 
with peak caps — I suppose all her officers. 
There are ships I have met more than once 

215 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

and known well by sight whose names I 
have forgotten; but the name of that ship 
seen once so many years ago in the clear 
flush of a cold, pale sunrise I have not for- 
gotten. How could I — the first English ship 
on whose side I ever laid my hand! The 
name — I read it letter by letter on the bow — 
was James Westoll. Not very romantic, you 
will say. The name of a very considerable, 
well-known, and universally respected North- 
country ship-ov/ner, I believe. James Westoll ! 
What better name could an honorable hard- 
working ship have? To me the very grouping 
of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling 
of her reality as I saw her floating motionless 
and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere 
purity of the light. 

We were then very near her and, on a 
sudden impulse, I volunteered to pull bow 
in the dinghy which shoved off at once to 
put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned 
by the faint air which had attended us all 
through the night, went on gliding gently 
past the black, glistening length of the ship. 
A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was 
then that, for the very first time in my life, 
I heard myself addressed in English — the 
speech of my secret choice, of my future, of 

216 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

long friendships, of the deepest affections, 
of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of 
solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts 
pursued, of remembered emotions — of my 
very dreams! And if (after being thus fash- 
ioned by it in that part of me which cannot 
decay) I dare not claim it aloud as my own, 
then, at any rate, the speech of my children. 
Thus small events grow memorable by the 
passage of time. As to the quality of the 
address itself I cannot say it was very striking. 
Too short for eloquence and devoid of all 
charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the 
three words "Look out there!" growled out 
huskily above my head. 

It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had 
an obtrusive, hairy double chin) in a blue 
woolen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up 
very high, even to the level of his breast- 
bone, by a pair of braces quite exposed to 
public view. As where he stood there was 
no bulwark, but only a rail and stanchions, I 
was able to take in at a glance the whole 
of his voluminous person from his feet to 
the high crown of his soft black hat, which 
sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big 
head. The grotesque and massive aspect of 
that deck-hand (I suppose he was that — very 

217 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

likely the lamp-trimmer) surprised me very 
much. My course of reading, of dreaming, 
and longing for the sea had not prepared me. 
for a sea brother of that sort. I never met 
again a figure in the least like his except in 
the illustrations to Mr. W. W. Jacobs's most 
entertaining tales of barges and coasters; but 
the inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking 
endless fun at poor, innocent sailors in a 
prose which, however extravagant in its fe- 
licitous invention, is always artistically ad- 
justed to observed truth, was not yet. Per- 
haps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I 
fancy that, at most, if he had made his nurse 
laugh it was about all he had achieved at that 
early date. 

Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, 
I could not have been prepared for the sight 
of that husky old porpoise. The object of 
his concise address was to call my attention 
to a rope which he incontinently flung down 
for me to catch. I caught it, though it was 
not really necessary, the ship having no way 
on her by that time. Then everything went 
on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a 
slight bump against the steamer's side; the 
pilot, grabbing the rope ladder, had scrambled 
half-way up before I knew that our task of 

218 



A PERSONAL RECORD 

boarding was done; the harsh, muffled clang- 
ing of the engine-room telegraph struck my 
ear through the iron plate; my companion in 
the dinghy was urging me to "shove off — push 
hard"; and when I bore against the smooth 
flank of the first English ship I ever touched 
in my life, I felt it already throbbing under 
my open palm. 

Her head swung a little to the west, point- 
ing toward the miniature lighthouse of the 
Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly 
distinguishable against the land. The dinghy 
danced a squashy, splashy jig in the wash of 
the wake; and, turning in my seat, I followed 
the James Westell with my eyes. Before she 
had gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted 
her flag, as the harbor regulations prescribe 
for arriving and departing ships. I saw it 
suddenly flicker and stream out on the flag- 
staff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, 
colorless atmosphere bathing the drab and 
gray masses of that southern land, the livid 
islets, the sea of pale, glassy blue under the pale, 
glassy sky of that cold sunrise, it was, as far as 
the eye could reach, the only spot of ardent 
color — flame-like, intense, and presently as 
minute as the tiny red spark the concentrated 
reflection of a great fire kindles in the clear 

219 



A PERSONAL RECORD A^) 

heart of a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign 
— the symbolic, protecting, warm bit of bunt- 
ing flung wide upon the seas, and destined for 
so many years to be the only roof over my 
head. 



THE END 





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